Steven Rouk

🐥 Founder @ Director of AI @ AI + writing @

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

The fact that some animals are purposefully bred into existence only to live miserable lives and then be killed and thrown in the trash is one of the saddest things I can possibly think of

[Legal Impact for Chickens @ChickensLegal]

Smithfield reduced food waste by 57%!

This is a win for animals bc less food waste = fewer animals needed to feed the same # of people!

Good work!

https://t.co/3WArOR2SCX

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

@OpenAIDevs Wooooo unread indicators coming back after restart! This is a big one for me, thanks

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

"I was gonna send like a horse tongue or something to her mail"

Man it's incredible how angry and unhinged people get at animal advocates who are just saying things like "maybe we shouldn't literally torture billions of animals if we don't have to"

holy moly

[Kenny Torrella @KennyTorrella]

Really disturbing part of Animal Outlook's investigation: A manager talked about looking up where an investigator lives, fantasizing about mailing her a horse tongue. People risk their safety to simply show the public what factory farms look like. That's how bad the industry is.

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

@Ananthr27104587 yep, 5.5 xhigh fast

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

This graph probably means that most people still have no idea the phase change we've hit with AI and coding.

Anthropic code per employee didn't meaningfully hockey-stick until Q1 of this year, and I would guess they're several Q's ahead of most, regarding adoption and benefits.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor.

It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. https://t.co/OVVPJO7VQx

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

My current top concerns for ways AI could go horribly wrong for humans in the next 1-3 years are bioweapons, cyberattacks, and massive job displacement without social safety nets (and/or civil unrest from said displacement).

So this makes me happy to see AI leaders aligned on nudging Congress here.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis and many others have signed a letter urging Congress to increase security on orders of synthetic nucleic acids - and the equipment needed to make them - as models continue to become increasingly bio-capable.

[David Coman-Hidy @davidcomanhidy]

I've been working on farm animal protection for a while now, and I haven't seen anything quite like what's happening around the Save Our Bacon Act.

People who have never organized before, including some genuinely prominent voices, are hosting events, calling senators, and fundraising from friends. And those of us who have been here a while, across many ideological divides and every strategic disagreement, are showing up together.

We've always punched above our weight (out of necessity!), but this feels substantively very different. The political and social cost of supporting this barbarism is finally rising.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

I recently wrote about the effort to end the torture of pigs. On Thursday, @Dwarkesh_sp, @AvitalBalwit, and @NanRansohoff are hosting an in-person party for folks in the Bay Area to support the effort!

If you'd like to attend, sign up here! https://t.co/ccjHAbHoD6

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Three powerful pieces on the Save Our Bacon Act dropped this weekend: from @NickKristof, @kathleenparker, and @Noahpinion.

This is much needed. The mainstream media has been silent on what may be the greatest legislative threat to animal welfare in a generation.

There's been a grassroots revolt against the Act on X -- led by conservatives. But only one network has covered it: Fox, thanks to @TomiLahren.

This is exactly what the pork industry wants. It knows the Act is deeply unpopular. Its paid-for politicians can only pass it if they're never forced to defend it publicly.

They were hoping you wouldn't notice. They're now hoping you'll stay quiet. Prove them wrong.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

The Farm Bill -- passed by the House, now being considered in the Senate -- contains a measure that would ban states from banning horriffically abusive farming practices.

The cruelty is the point.

https://t.co/NzkOPNalQ3

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

@thsottiaux My side chats will suddenly stop working, says it can't find the thread and I can't send any more messages. Happens pretty consistently after a while in a side chat

[New York Times Opinion @nytopinion]

“One of the great but incomplete moral revolutions of our lifetime has been the expansion of our compassion to encompass farm animals in a limited way, even as corporate agriculture pushes in the other direction,” our columnist Nicholas Kristof writes. https://t.co/JptuTpsr07

[Kenny Torrella @KennyTorrella]

I've been thinking more about *time* when I think about animal cruelty. Usually I've thought about severity of pain but this meme really drives home the time element. These animals are in a lot of pain *and* are bored, which slows down time. And they have no distracting stimuli.

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

Dang, looks like my last steering message inadvertently got it to call it quits early, too -- it wasn't even done yet

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

New personal time record for a single continuous Codex session doing valuable work

I know it's nothing compared to SOME of you... but I'm still proud

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

Frankly Codex is so fast at a lot of things that getting these types of numbers is HARD

[Sam Altman @sama]

AI should dramatically increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world.

The OpenAI Foundation is making an initial $250M commitment to measurement, transition support, and new approaches to broadly shared prosperity.

https://t.co/zOD8O94RjQ

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

Yeah maybe humans do prefer these constructs on average (and they're helpful) but not in EVERY piece of writing. So the patterns get amplified and abused until they start being AI cliche.

In real life you have diverse humans who speak and write differently, and editorial regulation of patterns to keep them from being too frequent

Seems like a tough problem to solve with LLMs unless you add random inputs to prompts to shift their tendencies or something

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

@zermeloztt Make them count

[Steven Rouk @stevenrouk]

Codex is like having an always-available assistant and tech support who can do just about anything.

I use it for all kinds of little troubleshooting things that come up throughout the day. Things that would previously have been little pains or annoyances, but are now just quick chats to Codex while I keep working on other things.

Today, someone sent me a photo with no extension, and I wasn't sure how to tell what type of photo it was. I could've renamed it to jpg or png or avif or webp or whatever to try to brute force it, or manually looked up how to do it, but instead I just delegated to Codex and went back to what I was doing.

(And using Wispr Flow voice to text means that to type this text into Codex was just a few seconds.)

Little quality of life things.