There were times at this week’s World Economic Forum meeting when it seemed that Davos had turned into a high-profile technology conference, with appearances on stage by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen HuangAnthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadellaand even more industry executives.
Unsurprisingly, the big topic was artificial intelligence, with CEOs laying out a vision of the technology’s transformative potential while also acknowledging persistent concerns that they are inflating a huge bubble. Amid all the speculation about the big picture, they also found time to lash out at their competitors, and even their ostensible partners.
In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I discussed all things Davos with TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosek and Sean O’Kane.
Kirsten noted that the conference seemed to have transformed from previous years, with technology companies such as Meta and Salesforce dominating the main park, while important topics such as climate change failed to attract crowds. Even if AI executives aren’t, Sean said completely “Begging for usage and more customers”, it can sometimes seem that way.
Read a preview of our full conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, below.
Kirsten: Some discussions about, for example, climate change or poverty and major global problems, [are] Doesn’t really attract crowds. Meanwhile, on the main promenade in Davos, Switzerland, some of the largest storefronts have been converted and acquired by companies such as Meta, Salesforce, Tata, and several Middle Eastern countries as well. I think the biggest one was the American House, which was sponsored by McKinsey and Microsoft. It really felt different visually.
And then Elon Musk was there – Sean, you and I listened. There wasn’t a lot of people there, but I will say it was interesting for him to attend, because he’s avoided Davos in the past.
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Anthony: We were trying to pull the technology content of Davos, [and] There are certainly things worth highlighting here, but what’s also surprising, especially as AI has become such a big business story, is that it’s hard to completely separate that from all the other topics that revolve around larger questions about international trade, about global politics.
One of the big headlines coming out [Davos]To us at least, it was Anthropic’s CEO’s comments, where he basically attacked the Trump administration’s decision to let Nvidia Sending chips to China. It’s a technology story, but it’s also a business story, it’s a political story.
I think in terms of the substance of what he said, it seemed consistent to me, in the sense that he was generally comfortable with running his mouth, and also that this interesting sentence [in AI discourse] That’s where there’s an element of criticism, but it’s also tied into this intense AI hype. One of the phrases he uses is that an AI data center is like a country full of geniuses. I have questions about that – but he said, “How can we send all these chips to China if we’re worried about China? Because we’re basically sending a country full of geniuses to China and letting them control it.”
Shawn: You could probably fill a notebook with all the different weird phrases these CEOs are using this week. Another thing that stuck with me was that Satya Nadella kept calling data center token factories, which is a fascinating abstraction of what he thinks they’re there for.
You know, there were two things that really caught my attention about all the different things that these CEOs said at different parts of the week. The first is that they’re definitely sniping at each other — not just Anthropic with Nvidia, which is interesting in itself, because Anthropic is a huge customer of Nvidia and uses Nvidia GPUs, and there’s an interesting tension there. But also just seeing them sitting next to each other and kind of pulling out knives, you know, a little bit more than we’re used to seeing.
We know that they are all vying to be at the top and that they are also trying to retain talent without overspending themselves to death. This was one of the first times that I really felt like that tension was palpable and that they were there for it. These two things are often not true at the same time.
The other thing is, to your point about a lot of the geopolitics of it and its business – that was the most obvious thing that I feel like we’ve signed up these CEOs for as much as they think they need to continue to succeed.
Satya Nadella – I think you can maybe read it that unfavorably, but I don’t think it’s that unfavorable – it was like, “More people need to use this or it’s going to be a bubble and a bubble that’s going to burst.” He takes a much different stance in some ways than Anthropic’s Dario Amadi, because Nadella’s focus is really on trying to get as much widespread use as possible [and] How do we make sure that AI is equitable across all these different communities and across the world, versus focusing in one place, like just rich places, which I thought was an interesting tension. But there’s an element of him giving up the game of not doing it truly Begging for usage and more customers…but kind of.
Up until that point, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang had done something similar, more or less saying, “We’re not investing enough in this and we need more investment to make this work.”
Kirsten: Jensen’s comments were interesting because he actually talked about it in terms of job creation, and one could give the counter view, there will be a moment when construction slows down, but no one’s really talking about that now.
The other thing, I think, was a good point you made, which was that we didn’t see them all together in a room shooting each other. A lot of times you’ll have like Sam Altman at a conference or Satya [Nadella]But here they are all together. So you’re hearing it in real time.
