My colleague Ben Bergman rubbed shoulders with world leaders, technology gurus, and venture capitalists this week in Davos.
There’s nothing better than being in the room where it happens. I asked Ben what he saw and heard. His highlights include:
Q: What was the biggest technology-related event talked about at Davos this year?
It’s hard to compete with President Trump and Greenland, but that aside, what everyone was talking about was AI.
There has been a lot of discussion about when companies will start to see productivity gains commensurate with their massive AI investments, and whether we are currently in a bubble.
Q: What technology-related discussions/themes surprised you at Davos?
Walking the boulevards of Davos is always a highlight. Because this week, all stores open for the rest of the year will be handed over to companies that will host “houses” to showcase their brands and host customers and events.
It’s interesting to see who’s here and who’s not.
Davos is not a technology conference. I’ve usually thought of Davos as dominated by finance and blue chips.
Walking down the street this year, 80% of the homes were high-tech homes. Palantir and Meta (with free hot chocolate stand) were the most prominent. Amazon’s house was surprisingly small. Google was far from major activity. Lightspeed was the only venture capital firm I saw that had a weird retro “lighthouse.”
It’s also interesting to see who wasn’t here. OpenAI doesn’t have a house and Sam Altman didn’t come, but some executives have been here. Elon Musk was not originally part of the program, but was suddenly added on Thursday.
Q: What was the tone among technology executives and technology investors there?
If executives and investors were worried about the future, they didn’t share it with me or on stage.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang described what’s happening with AI as “the greatest infrastructure development in human history” and said it would not only drive job creation across the global economy.
Q: What are the biggest concerns expressed by tech executives and tech investors at this year’s Davos conference?
Although optimism prevailed this week, the fear of falling into an AI bubble was on everyone’s mind.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned on stage Tuesday that there would be a bubble if the only companies using AI were other AI companies.
“By definition, for this not to be a bubble, the benefits need to be spread more evenly,” Nadella said.
Mr. Huang cited rising rental prices for computer chips as proof that we are not in a bubble.
“Renting an Nvidia GPU is incredibly difficult these days, and spot prices for GPU rentals have increased, not only for the latest generation but also for GPUs from two generations ago,” he said.
Another concern from the tech executives I spoke to was how difficult it is to hire and retain top talent right now, especially since the big AI labs are spending on hiring like drunken sailors.
“On a large level, it’s an astronomical amount,” Harvey CEO and co-founder Winston Weinberg told me. He said he spends 70 percent of his time recruiting.
“I’m very involved and I think that’s the most important thing in our company right now,” Weinberg said.
Q: Is there anything else that technology people should know during their tenure?
There were so many engineers here that sometimes it felt like I was in San Francisco.
I asked several startup founders why they traveled so far to be here, and the consensus was that nothing beats Davos when it comes to meeting potential customers and investors crammed into a small Swiss village for a week.
As I waited in the cold in a long line at a General Catalyst and Lightspeed party, I asked one of the founders why he was here.
He said that Alexandr Wang, founder and former CEO of Scale AI and now chief AI officer at Meta, advised him that Davos was very useful, as Wang said he signed on nearly a third of Scale’s customers in the short time he was here last year.
Mr. Weinberg told me that the deals had begun before I arrived, with many in the business class section of flights from San Francisco and New York to Zurich.
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