Satya Nadella says he changed his mind about whether making AI more powerful would also make it safer

• Satya Nadella says he changed his mind on AI alignment, or ensuring AI aligns with human values.
• Nadella said he previously thought alignment would just happen as AI capabilities improved.
• “I no longer believe that,” Nadella said on the 20VC podcast.

On a new episode of the 20VC podcast, host Harry Stebbings asked Nadella what he’d changed his mind about over the past year. The CEO said he had previously assumed that as AI became more capable, alignment — ensuring AI behaves in line with human values and goals — would automatically follow.

Instead, he said, while scaling has played out as he expected and the models’ capabilities have continued to improve, alignment remained a challenge.

“I used to always think that alignment would just fall out,” Nadella said. “I no longer believe that. I think this alignment thing may be a harder, different problem.”

The Microsoft CEO previously warned about the risks of AI and argued for greater external controls in a post on X on October 10. Nadella said companies should treat AI models as insider threats and assume they are “compromised.”

“We need to surround non-deterministic models with strong, deterministic system design, human controls, and reliable operating procedures, and establish industry standards where existing ones are insufficient,” Nadella wrote.

His belief that AI’s increasing capabilities won’t automatically ensure human control is in line with warnings of other tech leaders. Both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned about the threats of AI. A letter signed by more than 1,000 AI workers in July warned that AI capabilities could advance faster than people’s ability to understand or control the systems.

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