At times this week at the World Economic Forum, Davos appeared to be turning into a powerhouse technology conference, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and more industry executives taking to the stage.
Unsurprisingly, the biggest topic was AI, with CEOs laying out their vision for the technology’s transformative potential, while also acknowledging continued concerns that AI is inflating a giant bubble. Amid these big predictions, they sometimes found time to attack competitors and even their ostensible partners.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I chatted with TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec and Sean O’Kane about all things Davos.
Kirsten noted that the conference looked different than in years past, with technology companies like Meta and Salesforce taking over the main promenades, while important topics like climate change didn’t draw crowds. And Sean said it sometimes feels that way, even if AI executives aren’t good enough to “handle usage and handle more customers.”
Read a preview of the full conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Kerstin: For example, some of the discussions about climate change and poverty and other big global issues are not very engaging. Meanwhile, on the main promenade in Davos, Switzerland, some of the largest stores are being renovated and taken over by companies such as Meta, Salesforce, Tata and many 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 Elon Musk was there too — Sean, you and I both heard that. There wasn’t much there, but he’s avoided Davos in the past, so it was interesting to see him show up.
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Anthony: We were trying to bring out the technical content of Davos. (And) there are absolutely things worth highlighting here, but it’s also striking that, especially with AI becoming such a big business story, it’s hard to completely separate it from all the other threads that are going on in terms of larger issues about international trade and world politics.
One of the big headlines that came out[of Davos]at least for us, was a statement by Anthropic’s CEO, where he basically attacked the Trump administration’s decision to allow NVIDIA to send chips to China. This is a technology story, a trade story, and a politics story.
In terms of the content of what he said, it felt consistent in the sense that he was generally off-putting, and there’s an element of criticism in this interesting line (in AI discourse), but it also ties into 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 doubts about that, but he said: “How can we send all these chips to China if we’re worried about China? Because essentially we’re sending a country full of geniuses to China and letting China control it.”
Sean: You could write down all the different weird phrases that CEOs are using this week in a notebook. Another thing that sticks in my mind is that Satya Nadella kept referring to data centers as token factories. This is a nice abstraction of what he thinks data centers are for.
You know, there were two things that really stood out to me about the different things that these CEOs said at different times during the week. One is that it’s not just Anthropic and Nvidia, they’re definitely attacking each other in all kinds of ways. That’s interesting because Anthropic is a big Nvidia customer and uses Nvidia GPUs, so there’s an interesting tension there. But just to see them sitting next to each other and pulling it out a little bit more than we’re used to seeing them with their knives out.
We know they’re all striving to take center stage, and we know they’re all trying to retain their talent without wasting it to death. And this was one of the first times that the tension was palpable and it really felt like they were there. These two things are not often true at the same time.
The other thing is, of the many points you make about geopolitics and the business of it, I feel like this one is the most blatant and puts on record what CEOs think they need to continue to be successful.
Satya Nadella — I think it might be read unfavorably like this, but I don’t think it’s that unfavorable — it was more or less like, “More people need to use this, or the bubble is going to burst.” He took a very different position in some ways than Anthropic’s Dario Amadei. I thought this was an interesting tension because Nadella’s focus is really on trying to scoop up as much usage as possible broadly (and how do we ensure that the AI is fair across all these different communities and around the world, rather than being concentrated in one place, like only wealthy places). But there’s an element of him giving up on the game rather than really begging for usage or more customers…but kind of.
And at that point, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang did something similar and more or less said, “We haven’t invested enough in this, and we need more investment to make this work.”
Kirsten: Jensen’s comment was interesting. Because he was actually talking about it in terms of job creation. You could also argue that there will come a point when job growth slows down, but no one is seriously talking about that right now.
I think the other thing was a good point you made. That said, we never really saw them huddled in a room sniping at each other. Conferences often have guys like Sam Altman and Satya (Nadella), but here they’re all there. That means you’re listening in real time.
