Steven Sinofsky

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

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.

We are live with Steven Sinofsky, who is a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

He's a seed investor, author of the Substack and the book Hardcore Software.

Previously, he was the president of Microsoft's Windows division, engineering and marketing across Windows, uh, Windows Live and Internet Explorer, and he posts on Twitter at, @stevesi.

They will get the regulation this rhetoric is calling for, not what they're prescribing, and it may be the largest cell phone in the history of tech." In other words, the argument here is that the presumption that the government is simply going to accept the industry's proposals as the right thing to do is ludicrous, and it is far more likely that they take far more dramatic action, justified in large part by the AI industry's leader's own rhetoric about potential apocalyptic futures.

Wrote investor Steven Sinofsky, "The most naive position is thinking that your inputs to government lead to the outputs you expect.

Government machinery is nothing at all like private enterprise.

No one is in charge to create a point of view, and everything splits the baby, so no one likes the results by design." Austin Allred put it more simply: "The problem with Dario's position is he thinks if he compliments government and regulation profusely enough, if he says he really, really wants to be regulated, that he'll be in charge of how that happens, but he won't.

Shout out Evan Kiersztel for that.

Even Sinofsky, he quoted a bunch of things that refute exactly what Dario had said before in this two-part X essay.

"You have literally said in just one essay, 'The Adolescence of Technology,' the single most serious national security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever.

Humanity needs to wake up.

On this episode of the A16Z podcast, we're diving into how AI is reshaping not just software, but the entire foundation of modern computing.

Steven Sinofsky joins us with some fascinating observations.

And one of his key points really caught my attention.

He says the industry has fundamentally shifted from an engineering-bound problem to a capital problem.