Tech CEOs boast and bicker about AI at Davos

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.

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 allow Nvidia to send chips to China. It’s a story that is a tech 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 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’s an element of criticism, 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 questions about that — but he’s like, “How could we possibly send all these chips to China if we’re worried about China? Because essentially we’re 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 that these CEOs use this week. The other one that has been 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’re there for.

You know, there were two things that really stuck out to me about all the different things that were said by these CEOs in different parts of the week. One is that they are definitely all sort of sniping at each other — not just Anthropic with Nvidia, which is interesting in its own right, because Anthropic is a huge Nvidia customer and uses Nvidia GPUs, and there’s an interesting tension there. But also just seeing them sitting them next to each other and really kind of pulling, know, putting the knives out a little bit more than we’re used to seeing.

We know that they’re all jockeying to be the lead and that they’re also trying to hold on to talent without overspending themselves to death. And this was one of the first times where it really felt like that tension was palpable and that they were present for it. Those 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 blatant that I feel like we’ve gotten these CEOs on record as far as what they think they need to continue succeeding.

Satya Nadella — I think you could maybe unfavorably read it this way, but I don’t think it’s that unfavorable — more or less was like, “More people need to be using this or else it’s going to be a bubble and a popped bubble.” He took a much different position in some ways from Dario Amadei of Anthropic, because Nadella’s focus is really about trying to broadly scoop up as much usage as possible [and] how do we make sure that AI is equitable across all these different communities and throughout 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 of not really panhandling for usage and more customers … but kind of.