Tech CEOs boast and bicker about AI at Davos

There were times during this week’s meeting of the World Economic Forum when Davos seemed to have transformed into a high-powered technology 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 was, unsurprisingly, AI, with CEOs outlining a vision for the technology’s transformative potential while acknowledging ongoing concerns that they are inflating a massive bubble. In the midst of all those big predictions, they also found time to take aim at their competitors, and even 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 to have undergone a transformation from recent years, with tech companies such as Meta and Salesforce taking over the main promenade, while key topics such as climate change failed to attract much of an audience. And Sean said that even if AI managers weren’t rather ‘begging for use and more customers’, that’s what it can sometimes feel like.

Read a preview of our full conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Kirsten: Some discussions about climate change, poverty and major global problems, for example [are] doesn’t really attract much of an audience. Meanwhile, on the main boulevard in Davos, Switzerland, some of the largest storefronts have been converted and taken over by companies such as Meta and Salesforce, Tata and many Middle Eastern countries as well. And I think the biggest one was USA House, which was sponsored by McKinsey and Microsoft. It really felt different visually.

And then Elon Musk was there – Sean, you and I both listened to it. There weren’t many of those, but I have to say it was interesting that he showed up as he has avoided Davos in the past.

Anthony: We tried to extract the technical content of Davos, [and] There are definitely things worth highlighting here, but it’s also striking how, especially as AI has become such a big business story, it’s hard to completely separate that from all the other discussions that are going on in terms of bigger questions about international trade, about global politics.

One of the big headlines that comes out [Davos]to us at least, were Anthropic’s CEO’s comments, in which he essentially attacked the Trump administration’s decision to allow Nvidia sending chips to China. It’s a story that’s a technology story, but it’s also a trade story, it’s a political story.

I think in terms of the content of what he said, it felt consistent to me in the sense that he generally feels comfortable shooting his mouth off, and also that it’s this interesting sentence [in AI discourse] where there is an element of criticism, but it also ties in with this really intense AI hype. One of the statements he used was that an AI data center is a land of geniuses. I have questions about that, but he says, “How can we send all these chips to China if we’re worried about China? Because we’re essentially sending a country full of geniuses to China and letting them take control.”

Sean: You could probably fill a notebook with all the different weird phrases these CEOs are using this week. The other thing that stuck in my mind is that Satya Nadella kept calling data centers token factories, which is a beautiful abstraction of what he thinks they are for.

You know, there were two things that really struck me about all the different things that these CEOs were saying at different parts of the week. One is that they’re certainly all mocking each other – not just Anthropic with Nvidia, which is interesting in itself, because Anthropic is a big Nvidia customer and uses Nvidia GPUs, and there’s an interesting tension there. But also just to see them sitting next to each other and really kind of pulling, you know, sticking the blades out a little bit more than we’re used to.

We know they’re all trying to take charge and they’re also trying to hold on to their talent without spending themselves to death. And this was one of the first times where it really felt like the tension was palpable and that they were there. These two things are not often true at the same time.

The other point, to your point about a lot of the geopolitics of it and the business of it – this was the most egregious thing that I think we’ve put these CEOs on notice of what they think they need to continue to succeed.

Satya Nadella – I think you could maybe read it this way in a pejorative sense, but I don’t think it’s that unfavorable – something like, “More people need to use this or it will be a bubble and a burst bubble.” He took a very different stance than Anthropic’s Dario Amadei in some ways, as Nadella’s focus is really on trying to gather as much usage broadly as possible. [and] How do we make sure that AI is fair across all these different communities and across the world, rather than concentrated in one place, like just the rich places, which I think was an interesting tension. But there is an element of him not giving the game away Real begging for use and more customers… but sort of.

And up until that point, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was doing 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 really talked about it in terms of job creation, and you could give the counterpoint: there will come a point when the buildout slows, but no one is really talking about that right now.

The other thing, I think, was a good point you made, which is that we’ve never seen them all together in a room shooting at each other. Often you have something like Sam Altman at a conference or Satya [Nadella]but here they are all together. So you hear it in real time.