Co-lead / Director @Google AI x Economy Program. AP (on leave) @Wharton. Cofounder @workhelix. Everyone can just do stuff and that's {good, bad}.
Philadelphia, PA
Joined December 2008
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here's some good stuff
Woooooowww. This is the confirmation we’ve been waiting for!
Moderna and Merck’s personalized mRNA cancer vaccine reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 42% when added to Keytruda after surgery, compared with Keytruda alone!
And yes, it uses the same mRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines!
Daniel Rock retweeted
slowly and then all at once. this is way more important than bots that live in your text messages and book your flights or whatever
Daniel Rock retweeted
Thanks @danielrock for bringing this one to my attention. For anyone else who is interested, I discuss these ideas in more detail here: xitter.cf/MartinBeraja/status/20…
Daniel Rock retweeted
The Napster analogy misses a broader historical pattern.
Oil prospectors drawing from shared reservoirs, radio broadcasters occupying airwaves, advertising platforms collecting consumer data, and now AI companies training on creative works.
Time and again, innovators pushing the resource frontier moved first, appropriating resources before the rights governing their use were settled. Conflict followed. And more often than not, the taking that followed the making was legitimized after the fact.
Napster faced a different situation. Property rights in recorded music were relatively well established, and Napster was a small outsider confronting a powerful incumbent industry. In that respect, it was closer to DuPont's development of plastics, where the petrochemical inputs had identifiable owners and access had to be negotiated.
AI is different on both counts. Whether training on creative works constitutes fair use remains contested, and the leading AI companies have vastly greater economic and political clout than Napster ever did.
The broader historical lesson is that the prospect of appropriating resources can itself spur frontier innovation. Far from being merely an unfortunate consequence of it, appropriation and conflict are often part of the very process of economic growth.
Back in late 2023, when the New York Times first sued OpenAI, I went on a podcast and called it the Napster moment for AI.
Napster was the most popular thing on the internet in 1999, got sued almost immediately, and was gone by 2001. The lawsuit didn't really turn on the money. It turned on the precedent: a business built to take everything first and sort out the rights later got ruled flatly wrong, and that ruling is what let every rights holder line up behind it to collect.
Back then my read was that the AI companies would eventually license the material they'd been scraping, because fighting every rights holder one at a time is a worse business than just paying them. Since 2023 the licensing deals have stacked up, Axel Springer, the AP, News Corp, Reddit. The Times case itself is still grinding on with no ending.
I don't think the real lesson is about AI, though. Any business built on taking something it didn't get permission for eventually pays for it or gets rebuilt around not having it. That's the actual reason we went the opt-in route on our data years ago, back when opt-in just looked slow. I've watched which side of that fight usually wins.
Daniel Rock retweeted
Awesome piece from @bencasselman on what history can teach us about how technological change goes and what a wide range of outcomes there can be (with a fantastic appearance by @hillaryvipond) nytimes.com/2026/10/22/busin…
I’m starting to wonder if models are in a kind of uncanny valley (@hamsabastani and @dellacquafabri have papers to this effect). Often people complain that a model hallucinated still. They all do that sometimes! Theyll also try to delete your whole computer sometimes.
Don’t be lulled… you still have to pay attention.
Daniel Rock retweeted
I think this concept will be an important train & test objective going forward: take a paper's codebase, remove the key parts and see if an agent can code them from scratch *and* add improvements. More tasks coming soon!
there are lessons for today's internet/vulnerabilities from the introduction of HFT into financial markets. verification of flow, designed network structures to block or intermediate potentially damaging traffic, circuit breakers, correlated activity leading to herding.
without redesign of our systems we're going to lose a lot, with redesign we'll see new possibilities.
we need the "immune system" as @AndrewWLo would say
Don’t be silly enough to connect agents to your bank 🤦♂️
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Daniel Rock retweeted
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Daniel Rock retweeted
I complain plenty about Oakland city government. But at dinner 2yo swallowed something wrong and started choking. She was still breathing, but with difficulty. When she couldn't talk or make sounds above a whisper we called 911.
You're not supposed to do the Heimlich if the airway is only partially obstructed, apparently, but this meant there was nothing to do at all except stand there and encourage her to cough. "Yell," we would suggest to her between coughs, and she'd make these concerning little whistley sounds.
I think the first police officer was on our doorstep in like 3 minutes, and a fire truck and ambulance within 5. Of course the minute they arrived she coughed successfully and was completely fine.
But if she hadn't been - and when this kind of thing happens it's impossible not to play out what happens if it hadn't been - help was minutes away.
Sometimes it feels like I owe more to our civilization than I could ever possibly repay. I write blog posts, and raise kids, and if I ever need it a dozen strangers will be at my doorstep with unfathomably complicated emergency medicine. I am grateful to the cops and the firefighters and the paramedics and the city of Oakland. I will probably sentimentally vote for some of the bond issues I was on the fence about even though we already have the highest taxes in the Bay.
She's fine. We sang happy birthday to her Mommy a couple minutes later, and she sang the loudest.
Daniel Rock retweeted
We are hiring!!
"Artificial intelligence, broadly construed. This includes embodied AI and robotics, machine learning and the systems that support it, and AI developed for problems in science, engineering, medicine, education, and society."
jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assistant…
I’m optimistic that the vulns will be patched and we’ll have a safer internet soon. In the meantime the “discount rate” on any exploits bad actors have found and were “saving” has gone up, shifting forward the incentive to use them. Defense will win but it’s gonna be rough sledding for a little.
Daniel Rock retweeted
PHP changes are live. Start patching. php.net/archive/2026.php#202…
Huge thanks to coordinated work by @ThePHPF!
PHP sites behind Cloudflare already have an initial set of WAF rules deployed for the known exploit vectors in these vulnerabilities. The rules are available to all customers, including free.
We are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up.
This is a STOPGAP only. Patch as soon as @ThePHPF releases the update at 14:00 UTC today.
Daniel Rock retweeted
Very funny that billionaires are like “I am leaving”. And Zucman’s response is “sorry no, my theory doesn’t allow this”
