There were times at this week’s World Economic Forum meeting when Davos seemed transformed into a powerful technology conference, with appearances on stage by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and even more industry leaders.
The big topic, unsurprisingly, was AI, with CEOs laying out a vision for the technology’s transformative potential while also acknowledging lingering concerns that they are inflating a massive bubble. Amidst all the great forecasting, they also found time to take care of their competitors and even their apparent partners.
In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I discussed all things Davos with TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec and Sean O’Kane.
Kirsten noted that the conference seemed transformed from previous years, when tech companies like Meta and Salesforce took over the main promenade, while important topics like climate change didn’t draw crowds. And Sean said that even though AI bosses weren’t quite “panhandling for use and more customers,” it could feel like that sometimes.
Read a preview of our full conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Kirsten: Some of the discussions around, say, climate change or poverty and major global issues, [are] doesn’t really draw the crowds. Meanwhile, on the main promenade in Davos, Switzerland, some of the biggest storefronts have been transformed and taken over by companies like Meta and Salesforce, Tata, also a lot of Middle Eastern countries. And I think the biggest one was USA House, which was sponsored by McKinsey and Microsoft. It really felt visually different.
And then Elon Musk was there – Sean, you and I both listened to it. There wasn’t much there, but I will say it was interesting that he showed up, because in the past he’s avoided Davos.
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Anthony: We tried to extract the technical content from Davos, [and] there are definitely things worth highlighting here, but it’s also striking how, especially since AI has become such a big business story, it’s hard to completely separate it from all the other threads that relate to larger issues of international trade, of world politics.
One of the big headlines to come out of [Davos]to us at least, were the remarks from Anthropic’s CEO basically attacking this Trump administration decision to allow Nvidia to ship chips to China. It’s a story that’s a technology story, but it’s also a trade story, it’s a political story.
I think in terms of the content of what he said, it felt consistent to me in the sense that he’s generally comfortable shooting his mouth off, and also that it’s this interesting line [in AI discourse] where there is an element of criticism, but it also ties in with this really intense AI hype. One of the phrases he used was that an AI data center is like a country full of geniuses. I have questions about that – but he says, “How could we possibly send all these chips to China if we’re worried about China? Because we’re basically sending a country full of geniuses over to China and letting them control it.”
Sean: You could probably fill a notebook with all the different weird phrases these CEOs are using this week. The other one that has stuck in my mind is that Satya Nadella kept calling the data centers token factories, which is a wonderful abstraction of what he thinks they are there for.
You know, there were two things that really struck me about all the different things that were said by these CEOs in different parts of the week. One is that they’re definitely all kind of sneaking up on each other — not just Anthropic with Nvidia, which is interesting in itself because Anthropic is a big Nvidia customer and uses Nvidia GPUs, and there’s an interesting tension there. But also just seeing them sitting next to each other and really pulling, you know, putting the knives out a little bit more than we’re used to seeing.
We know they’re all jockeying to be at the top, and they’re also trying to hold on to the talent without overexerting themselves to death. And it was one of the first times where it really felt like the tension was palpable and that they were there for it. The two things are not often true at the same time.
The other thing, to your point about a lot of the geopolitics of it and the business of it — this was the most obvious thing that I feel like we’ve got these CEOs on record as far as what they think they need to continue to be successful.
Satya Nadella — I think you could maybe read it this way, but I don’t think it’s that unfavorable — was more or less like, “More people need to use this or it’s going to be a bubble and a burst bubble.” He took a very different stance in some ways than Dario Amadei of Anthropic, because Nadella’s focus is really about trying to get as much use as possible. [and] how do we make sure AI is fair across all these different societies and across the globe, versus concentrated in one place, like only the wealthy places, which I thought was an interesting tension. But there is an element of him giving away the game if not really panhandling for use and more customers … but sort of.
And to that point, Jensen Huang of Nvidia did something similar where he more or less said, “We’re not investing enough in this, and we need more investment to be able to make this work.”
Kirsten: Jensen’s comments were interesting because he really talked about it in terms of job creation, and you could counter that there will be a moment when expansion slows down, but no one is really talking about that right now.
The other thing, I think was a good point you made, which is that we’ve never really seen them all together in a room sneaking up on each other. Often you want like Sam Altman at a conference or Satya [Nadella]but here they all are. So you hear it in real time.