There were moments at this week’s World Economic Forum meeting when Davos appeared to be transforming into a high-tech conference, with on-stage appearances from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen HuangAnthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadellaand even more industry executives.
The big topic, unsurprisingly, was artificial intelligence, with CEOs creating a vision for the technology’s transformative potential while also acknowledging ongoing concerns that they are inflating a huge bubble. In the midst of all this big-picture forecasting, they’ve also found time to bash their competitors and even their supposed partners.
On 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 looked transformed from previous years, with tech companies like Meta and Salesforce taking over the main promenade, while important topics like climate change failed to draw crowds. And Sean said that even if they weren’t AI executives enough “More customers,” it could sometimes feel like that.
Read a preview of our full conversation below, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Kirsten: Some of the debates around, say, climate change or poverty and big global problems, [are] doesn’t really draw the crowds. Meanwhile, on the main promenade in Davos, Switzerland, some of the biggest storefronts have been converted and occupied by companies such as Meta and Salesforce, Tata, also several Middle Eastern countries. And I think the biggest one was USA House, which was sponsored by McKinsey and Microsoft. It was really different visually.
And then Elon Musk was there — Sean, and you and I heard it. He wasn’t there much, but I will say it was interesting that he showed up, because he has avoided Davos in the past.
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Anthony: We were trying to get the technological content out of Davos, [and] There are absolutely things worth pointing out here, but it’s also striking how, especially as AI has become such a big business story, it’s hard to fully separate it from all the other issues going on in terms of bigger questions about international trade, global politics.
One of the big titles coming out [Davos]for us at least, it was the remarks of the CEO of Anthropic, where he basically attacked this Trump administration’s decision to allow Nvidia to send chips to china. It’s a story that’s a technology story, but it’s also a trade story, it’s a politics story.
I think in terms of the substance of what he said, it seemed consistent to me in the sense that he’s generally comfortable speaking his mouth and also that it’s this interesting line [in AI discourse] where there’s an element of criticism, but it’s also linked to this really strong 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 send all these brands 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.”
Sean: You could probably fill a notebook with all the different weird phrases these CEOs are using this week. The other thing that has stuck in my mind is that Satya Nadella kept calling data centers token factories, which is a wonderful abstraction of what he thinks is there.
You know, there were two things that really stood out to me about all the different things that were said by these CEOs at different parts of the week. One is that they’re definitely blaming each other — not just Anthropic with Nvidia, which is interesting in itself because Anthropic is a huge Nvidia customer and uses Nvidia GPUs, and there’s an interesting tension there. But also just seeing them sit next to each other and pull, you know, pull out the knives a little bit more than we’re used to seeing.
We know that everyone wants to be the leader and that they are also trying to maintain their talent without overextending themselves to death. And that was one of the first times I really felt that the tension was palpable and that they were there for it. These two things don’t often happen at the same time.
The other thing, in your view of a lot of his geopolitics and his work — that’s been the most blatant I feel like we’ve recorded these CEOs in terms of what they think they need to continue to be successful.
Satya Nadella — I think maybe you could read it unfavorably that way, but I don’t think it’s that unfavorable — it was more or less like, “More people need to use this or it’s going to be a bubble and a bubble that’s bursting.” He took a very different position in some ways than Anthropic’s Dario Amadei because Nadella is focused on trying to gain as much usage as possible [and] how do we make sure AI is fair across all these different communities and across the world, versus concentrated in one place, like only the rich places, which I thought was an interesting tension. But there is an element of giving away his game no really panhandling to use and more customers… but kind of.
And at this point, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang did something similar, where he was pretty much saying, “We’re not investing enough in this, and we need more investment to be able to do this.”
Kirsten: Jensen’s comments were interesting because he really talked about that in terms of job creation, and one could argue that there will be a time when construction slows down, but nobody’s 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 focusing on 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 hear it in real time.
