Microsoft’s Satya Nadella changes his mind on AI alignment, recalls his take from 2018

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella has said that his views on AI have shifted in the past year. The Microsoft CEO was asked what he has changed his mind about in the last 12 months. His answer was about AI alignment, which is how to make sure AI systems do what people intend. Nadella started by looking back to the period around 2018 and 2019. He said that when Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Elon Musk were, as he put it, “one happy family”, they were the real believers in scaling laws. Nadella said that was also what he believed in back then.

What has changed Satya Nadella's mind in last 8 years

Nadella said the biggest change in his thinking is on alignment. He used to assume it would take care of itself. “When Dario and Ilya and Sam and Greg and Elon were all, I guess, one happy family, they were really the believers in scaling laws and that’s what I believed in back in 2018 and 2019. And I think the biggest change now I have is: ‘I used to always think that alignment will just fall out. I no longer believe that. So this alignment thing may be a harder, different problem. So that's the one thing I've changed my mind on,” Nadella said during an industry event in Germany recently. Alignment is the practice of designing AI systems so that their goals, behaviour and outputs match human intentions, values and ethical standards.

Satya Nadella on companies, governments rushing to patch PHP flaws

Nadella also reacted to the crisis that unfolded after security firms recorded millions of automated exploitation attempts within hours of a PHP bug’s public disclosure. The uncovered vulnerabilities in PHP, which is the foundational programming language that powers a majority of the worldwide web, sent global corporations and government agencies scrambling to patch the critical flaw. PHP operates as an essential web-building block alongside fundamental standards like HTML and Python. “I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time. It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks,” Nadella said, highlighting it is vital to build maintainable, secure software as architectures grow exponentially complex. From Tokyo to Helsinki, emergency shutdowns hit banking portals, rail services, flight bookings, tax departments and municipal communications – essentially triggering one of the most severe real-world stress tests ever faced by the aging, open-source codebases that keep people online, according to news agency Reuters.