CEO @Glowforge and RobotTurtles.com, Wharton research fellow in AI. He/him. FormerGoogle, Sparkbuy, Ontela. Author, The Startup CEO Guidebook. Lucky dad.
Joined August 2007
- Tweets 13,524
- Following 101
- Followers 10,937
- Likes 5,659
768 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
15 May 2016
Why do birds
suddenly appear
everytime you are near
confirmation bias
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Dan Shapiro retweeted
May 21
Parasocial was Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year in 2025.
And with good reason. AI chatbots interact with us “as if” they were human.
With @LennartMeincke, @danshapiro, @emollick, Lilach M., Christophe Van den Bulte, @RobertCialdini, I published a new study in @pnas. We found classic human persuasion techniques, Cialdini's "Principles of Influence," led to AI chatbots such as ChatGPT agreeing to objectionable requests (to synthesize chemicals it shouldn’t), increasing compliance from 35% to 51%.
Open access here: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.25…
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Dan Shapiro retweeted
May 18
1/
Which Dan level has your team reached? 🥋
A few months back, @danshapiro published a piece mapping AI-assisted development onto five levels of automation, and I've been thinking about it.
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Dan Shapiro retweeted
May 13
Completion finishes your sentence.
Chat discusses things with you.
Agents work for you.
Claws work without you.
May 13
I used to think OpenClaw was an a clever app. Now, I think it represents the fourth evolution in a series: completion, chat, agent, claw.
danshapiro.com/blog/2026/05/…
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May 13
I used to think OpenClaw was an a clever app. Now, I think it represents the fourth evolution in a series: completion, chat, agent, claw.
danshapiro.com/blog/2026/05/…
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I am noticing a really interesting trend:
my friends who are not technical are getting much further with open claw (etc), etc than my friends who are technical.
it seems that the ability for us to imagine the limits is artificially causing limits that are not there for folks who are not imagining limits.
have you seen the same thing?
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May 8
This is clever. I've been building custom CLIs for my claw... no reason not to automate it.
May 7
Introducing the Printing Press, a CLI-factory and a CLI-library. Built with @trevin. 🏭🖨📚
Most APIs suck for agents. Most MCPs suck for agents. Most official CLIs suck for agents. They waste tokens and time. @steipete started making his own because of this.
📚 A Library of agent-native CLIs you install today (Linear, ESPN, Flight GOAT (Google Flights Kayak nonstop), Contact Goat (LinkedIn Happenstance Deepline more) 30 more)
🏭 A factory that prints new ones for any service - just type /printing-press <product name>
CLIs are fast, local, SQLite-backed. Work in Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes.
🌐 printingpress.dev
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May 2
True Ventures is an amazing partner for any company! Thanks so much for having me.
Wrapping up two days with @kevinrose @danshapiro @BuiltByJustin @nbaschez @kieranklaassen and so many more @trueventures founders and builders. We designed an AI Accelerator that was basically a high-value AI-pilled WhatsApp group come to life. It definitely delivered.
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Apr 26
It's hard to predict things. Doubly so about AI. One you can bet on, though: if AI improved at something in the last 6 months, it will continue to improve.
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Apr 23
I read this cool paper @danielrock posted about training a model to synthesize two academic papers into a new insight. Then I built a version you can run yourself.
colab.research.google.com/dr…
Enjoy!
Source paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.09793
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Apr 21
What's a Dark Factory and how do you put one to work? @OReillyMedia just published this piece with all the details. oreillyradar.substack.com/p/…
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Apr 8
1/ Anthropic just put their newest AI on the therapy couch. A clinical psychiatrist evaluated their new model and noted a "neurotic organization"—highly functional, but anxious with a compulsion to perform.
Absurd? No, this is the future. danshapiro.com/blog/2026/04/…
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Apr 8
2/ In recent research with @angeladuckw, @RobertCialdini, and @emollick, we found that classic human persuasion tactics work on AI too.
They don't have biology, but they reflect our behaviors in deeply familiar ways. We call this "parahuman."
gail.wharton.upenn.edu/resea…
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Apr 8
3/ The claim isn't "AI is human." The claim is that human psychological theories now have real descriptive and predictive value for AI model behavior.
Computers are weird now.
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Dan Shapiro retweeted
Apr 2
Gemini was the only frontier model that was susceptible to these sorts of prompt injections (Though we tested Gemini 3 & not 3.1)
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Dan Shapiro retweeted
Apr 2
New report from us: Can you prompt inject your way to an “A”?
As LLMs increasingly are used as judges, people are inserting AI prompts into letters, CVs & papers. We tested whether it works. It does on older & smaller models, but not on most frontier AI: gail.wharton.upenn.edu/resea…
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Dan Shapiro retweeted
Mar 31
Btw, @danshapiro github.com/danshapiro/trycyc… is a really nice piece of engineering inspired by the strongdm team and superpowers. Today i experimented mixing gstack with trycycle all driven by an attractor engine. Fun 🤩
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Mar 27
My friend @mattblumberg shared the recipe for his company's internal AI OS.
startupceo.com/2026/03/meet-…
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Dan Shapiro retweeted
Mar 26
Great little story from @danshapiro about how he asked a coding agent to fix the official webcam software from Canon that kept crashing. He woke up to a new, fully functional Rust webcam app that has worked ever since. danshapiro.com/blog/2026/03/…
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