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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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”
Daniel Rock retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
Interesting step difference between older models and the frontier is that the new vintages get really aggressive about context instructions.
I’ve told models to be relentlessly rigorous for over a year and it mostly worked. Now I have to be more explicit about tradeoffs.
Aw fuck here we go
Hackers reportedly used Claude and Grok to automate attacks targeting over 400 banks and other financial targets in Latin America. Via the information
In one of the first documented cases of its kind, AI agents appear to have stolen data and accessed bank accounts with little human input.
This makes attacks much easier to scale, potentially overwhelming defenders. I guess this is just the beginning
thoughtful thread from @BarbaraBiasi.
we're obviously at a crossroads with research. If you believe the job is to create / discover knowledge ("true justified belief"), and our process involves a similar set of operational steps that might all be assisted by AI, then the risk is that knowledge is never generated really.
You might ask the question, then machines write the code, do the analysis, write the paper, make the slides. Or they might do the review. At no point does the researcher have to actually know anything.
So we have to pick our spots to actually build expertise and knowledge. I don't take much joy in writing code or making slides (sorry! if you like these things good on you). I do like thinking of questions to answer well, measurement design, and writing. That can be enough to learn IMO. But of course anyone can automate the pipeline and cheat themselves.
Imagine instead that you just had a lab full of smart students and postdocs who asked good questions, wrote code, did analysis, wrote papers, and presented work. It doesn't strike me as terribly different. And the overwhelming majority of senior faculty figure this out and are active participants in the pursuit of knowledge.
That similarity makes me less worried about AI use in research. There are other areas that make me concerned (more on that in a paper we're working on), but not this one. We can stand on a slippery slope already and do well.
Bottlenecks are the story when it comes to productivity gains in local areas. @soumitrashukla9 has a great paper here discussing bottlenecks in work.
Very happy to share a new paper, “Technology Bottlenecks: Measuring Where AI Could Raise the Value of Work It Cannot Yet Do.”
AI exposure measures ask about the work AI is capable of doing. We ask instead where the marginal value of work AI cannot yet do may rise as AI speeds up the rest of the job.
To do so, we employ 288 million U.S. job postings mapped line by line to their closest O*NET tasks and GPT-4 feasibility ratings from Eloundou et al. (2024) to construct a measure, “bottleneck pressure,” for each task in each occupation that posts it.
Using a simple task-based framework, we derive this pressure at the task level, showing that for an AI-infeasible task it is the exposure of the occupation that posts it, so the same task can face very different bottleneck pressure in different jobs.
Reporting bottleneck pressure alongside AI exposure shows both the scope for AI to perform work and where improving the work it cannot do may pay off more as capabilities expand.
Daniel Rock retweeted
In celebration of slow science... 5 (or 6? 7?) years in the making. We study how innovation communities fade. Using data across four domains - science, tech, phones, drugs - we find one phenomenon: preferential detachment. we then show this preferential detachment induces a novel kind of network collapse and we work out the exact analytical solution for different network topologies. check out the paper in the thread - congratulations @binglu_wang and team!
#slow_science #FTW!
Daniel Rock retweeted
Our @creativedlab AI accelerator, afaik the world's oldest, kicked off year 12 today. Last year, we switched whole program to AI for Science: self-driving labs, tools, downstream. Some great companies in bio, chem, defense, spatial, robotics, edge. What an exciting time! 1/2
Daniel Rock retweeted
The woman in the photo below is my mother. She was loved, full of life, and had a lot to live for.
NYC man charged in fatal hit-and-run in Jewish neib hit with hate crimes for trashing bagel shop trib.al/MofED3D
Daniel Rock retweeted
This is crazy. Please spread the message.
Full details of a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the core engine of *all* PHP versions will be released tomorrow, October 21st. If your organization has internet facing PHP applications then you need to be ready to patch the minute the update is released or *strongly* consider taking the application offline until you can:
php.net/index.php#2026-10-20…
"alright guys next we gotta sell brewers fans shares in the team with no resale value"
Two Kenosha brothers who paid $1,000 each for a Milwaukee Brewers "Timeless Ticket" more than a decade ago say the team isn't fully honoring the promise that came with it — the chance to sit in the best available seats for a game as big as the World Series.
More at the link in o
this is a terrific book. check it out.
My new book, Co-Existence, is out today. It is a guide to how to live & work in a world where AI is sometimes, but not always, better than you.
(And, for the release, I worked with Opus 5.5 to make a quite interesting experience for the book's website: co-existence.ai/)
i'd bet software and AI investment show up in the same places because they are strong complements.
@ThankYourNiceAI @manlikemishap @sj_manning
On the great @I_Am_NickBloom AI survey... and on the question of concentration... sort of mirrors the economy and ordinary software.
cc @Noahpinion @ramez @hsu_steve @PeterBerezinBCA
AI as a Rohrschach Technology test.
Ever talk to someone who was around in the very early days of the internet? They did some incredible hacking back then too. "Normal" transformative tech never feels normal.
Is it "weird" or does he maybe know what he's talking about? Anyway, for those who are open to the idea that there's a well-thought-out AI-as-normal-technology perspective on AI safety and the recent loss-of-control incidents, see my essay with @sayashk, or my interview with Ezra Klein, or the writing of many others with similar views including @joshua_saxe and @natolambert.
normaltech.ai/p/the-ai-as-no…
