There were times at this week’s meeting of the World Economic Forum when Davos seemed transformed into a high-powered tech conference, with on-stage appearances by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and even more industry executives.
The big topic, unsurprisingly, was AI, with CEOs laying a vision for the technology’s transformative potential while also acknowledging ongoing concerns that they’re inflating a massive bubble. Amidst all that big-picture prognostication, they also found time to take swipes at their competitors, and even at their ostensible 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 seemed transformed from past 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 AI execs weren’t quite “panhandling for usage and more customers,” it could sometimes feel that way.
Read a preview of our full conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Kirsten: Some of the discussions around, let’s say, climate change or poverty and big global problems, [are] not really attracting the crowds. Meanwhile, on the main promenade in Davos, Switzerland, some of the biggest storefronts have been converted and taken over by companies like Meta and Salesforce, Tata, also a lot of Middle East countries. And I think the largest was the USA House, which was sponsored by McKinsey and Microsoft. It really felt visually different.
And then Elon Musk being there — Sean, you and I both listened to it. There wasn’t a lot of there there, but I will say that it was interesting that he showed up, because in the past he has avoided Davos.
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Anthony: We were trying to pull out the tech content of Davos, [and] there are absolutely things that worth highlighting here, but it’s also striking how, especially as AI has become such a big business story, it’s hard to fully separate that from all the other threads going on in terms of bigger questions about international trade, about world politics.
One of the big headlines coming out of [Davos], for us at least, was the remarks by the CEO of Anthropic, where he basically attacked this Trump administration decision to a …