At Davos, rich and powerful now comfortable with power of AI
Last week’s annual gathering of the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a bit overshadowed by the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S.
The president made a virtual appearance at the conference, delivering a speech that hit on several of his recurring themes: tariffs, inflation and artificial intelligence.
AI has been a big topic at the summit for several years. But the way it was treated this year felt different, according to Reed Albergotti, tech editor at news website Semafor.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino caught up with Albergotti just as he was wrapping up his reporting at Davos. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Reed Albergotti: It was interesting just to sort of compare it to last year. I was in Davos last year and AI felt like it was everything at the conference last year. And it was sort of in the wake of the ChatGPT craze. And I think there was actually sort of panic about what this was going to mean for the world. You know, there were all sorts of panel discussions about, you know, every possibility, from AI destroying all of humanity to taking away all the jobs. This year, the panic was really gone. Most of the conversations I heard were sort of really kind of focused on the here and now, what is happening with this technology now? And, you know, are companies actually getting [return on investment] from their AI deployments? There were, you know, people from the media industry talking about, you know, how unfair it is that these AI models were trained using, you know, their technology. I think what was really missing, actually, was thinking ahead about, OK, what do we need to actually do in society to prepare for this massive change? Like, essentially, you know, people say, oh, AI is this really big deal. They’re not actually acting like it. There’s no talk of like, OK, what do we actually need to do to deal with, like, the possibility of a whole bunch of jobs actually going away very quickly? Which I think is a big issue.
Meghan McCarty Carino: Yeah. I mean, you wrote about how last year there was a lot of hype and a lot of freakout about AI, and this year it almost seemed like there wasn’t enough freakout.
Albergotti: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s right. I think that they sort of freaked out last time, last year, for the wrong reasons, and then didn’t freak out for, I think, legitimate reasons this year, which is we’ve seen that this technology is not just a fluke. It’s actually gotten much, much better over the last year. There have been new breakthroughs. You know, you’re seeing the capabilities increase to a point that software is probably the first industry, I think, that’s seeing major disruption from this technology. And I think that really should be scary for people who are, you know, world leaders, who have to deal with, you know, I think there’s rising populism around the world that has to do with, you know, the economic strife of really kind of like the middle class of developed countries, which doesn’t really have very much representation at this World Economic Forum.
McCarty Carino: What about the specter of some of President Trump’s potential actions around tariffs? Did that factor into kind of the tech or the AI discourse at all?
Albergotti: I heard people talking a little bit about tariffs, but I think because, you know, we’ve already sort of seen tariffs happen, and, you know, there’s a lot of panic about tariffs during Trump’s first term, but there were carveouts and things that sort of helped companies like Apple. So I don’t think the tariffs is really like the boogeyman that it used to be in tech. I think people sort of, it just didn’t seem like people were freaking out about it.
McCarty Carino: We’ve been hearing a lot about the vibe shift in tech. You know, this sense that tech leaders seem at least more open to, if not maybe overtly excited for, the Trump presidency. Was that evident at Davos at all?
Albergotti: There is a lot of optimism and excitement about the administration in certain circles of the tech industry. I wouldn’t say that the Davos crowd fits that. I definitely did talk to people, you know, who work for tech companies who feel like this is, ultimately, this will be a positive thing economically for them. But it’s almost just sort of like a matter-of-fact thing, like our stock price has gone up and, you know, we’re seeing economic activity increase and that’s a good thing. But it just didn’t, you know, I don’t think it’s like the same kind of exuberance that you’re seeing from, you know, people like Elon Musk, for instance, that sort of crowd.
Speaking of that vibe shift in tech, perhaps there is no better visual illustration of it than many tech leaders’ close physical proximity to the president at his inauguration.
The Wall Street Journal has diagrammed the seating arrangement, which shows half a dozen tech executives closer to the action than many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees.
Last week on the show, we talked to author Nadia Asparouhova about the rise of a movement to accelerate AI and other technologies in the name of global progress, kind of a techno-optimist backlash to the techno-pessimist backlash we saw in the 2010s.
Asparouhova said that optimism has suffused a lot of the tech sector, especially since the election, which brought hope for a lighter regulatory approach and a bigger seat at the table. That clearly has already become a reality.
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