AI Safety Language Is Destroying the Debate | Steven Sinofsky

Steven Sinofsky (0:00)

The AI people are making it impossible for anybody to understand what they've done. And they're using words like, well, the AI failed to be aligned. Okay, what does that mean? What it means is, there was a bug in the software. When Word ate your file and deleted all your content, we didn't think that demons had taken over Word and made it do things against the will of man.

But software doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it's a bug.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

When AI does something we didn't expect, is it misaligned or does the software just have a bug? A16z Board partner and former Microsoft Windows president, Steven Sinofsky, joins Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini on MTS to argue that the language around AI safety is making the technology harder to understand. Drawing on decades of building software, Steven explains why AI labs need better telemetry, debugging and incident reporting, and what today's industry can learn from earlier software failures, computer viruses and Y2K.

They also discuss why terms like alignment, goal-seeking and rogue agents can distort the policy debate, and why treating AI more like software could lead to clearer conversations about both safety and regulation.

Theo Jaffee (1:24)

We are live with Steven Sinofsky, who is a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He's a seed investor, author of the sub stack and the book Hardcore Software. Previously, he was the president of Microsoft's Windows division, engineering and marketing across Windows, Windows Live and Internet Explorer, and he posts on Twitter at Steve Si. Steven, welcome back.

Steven Sinofsky (1:44)

Howdy.

Theo Jaffee (1:46)

So we're just talking about, we're in DC right now at the FAI office. How about FAI? Yeah, we're at FAI. We've been talking about all of the new regulation and new laws that have been proposed for the AI industry over the last few weeks, including the Stop Rogue AI Act, which was proposed by Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. You're offering some thoughts on this.

What's your take?

Steven Sinofsky (2:12)

Well, sure. Well, right now, we're in the maximal phase of like, let's just throw tons of legislation out there. So real quick, I'm just going to take you back. I can't believe we're going to take you this far back. This is going to seem like infinity years ago in another dimension of time and space. But in 1983, I was a freshman in college. And one day in the fall, like there were two people in our 100-person dorm that had computers, me and another guy. And that was it. And there was nothing to do with them. Nobody knew why we had them, blah, blah, blah. And one day, literally, G-men in suits crashed our dorm, confiscated the other guy's computer, and arrested him.

Wow. And it turns out, fast forward a little bit, blah, blah, blah, he was part of a hacker group, one of the very, very, very first hacker groups called the Inner Circle or the Inner Ring.

And they were hacking this thing called GTE TeleMail. GTE was a big communications company, and it was one of the very first online mail services that you used a modem and you dialed up, and you could just mail other people without TeleMail. Who were some of the clients of it? The United States government and NASA in particular. And immediately after this series of arrests, they arrested people all over the country in this coordinated sting operation. I mean, imagine, I'm a freshman in college, and they just carted this guy off with this IBM PC XT that weighed 50 pounds and a giant monitor. And it was like a freshman in the same, we were in the computer science majors together, and it turns out that there was no crime committed. It wasn't illegal to do what they were doing. There was no law that they were violating.

Oh, wow. Suddenly, there were all of these hearings, and in the hearings in Congress, they're literally playing clips of the new movie War Games and explaining what this is happening. These kids in high school are going to take over the government and launch all the nuclear weapons. And that's what really happened. And it took several years before the first federal crime statute for hacking. And Ronald Reagan signed that, and that's what became illegal. And then five years later, four years after that, I'm at my first homecoming, and I go upstairs to the computer science building to go see my old advisor, like the day before, and there's a press conference going on. It was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen, a press conference in the middle of Ithaca, New York. And it turns out that was the press conference to announce that they've found a computer worm called the Morris computer worm that originated from Cordell.