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Sep 21, 2026 · 29m, Episode 1205

AI Safety Language Is Destroying the Debate | Steven Sinofsky

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a16z Board Partner and former Microsoft Windows president Steven Sinofsky joins Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini on MTS to argue that the language we use to describe AI failures is making it harder to understand what’s actually going wrong. Steven takes aim at terms like “alignment,” “goal-seeking,” and “rogue agents,” arguing that they can anthropomorphize problems that software engineers have dealt with for decades. His framing is simpler: when software doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it has a bug. And as AI becomes more widely deployed, labs need the same kind of telemetry, debu...

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