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Davos Dispatch: Is AI The New Altruism?
The WEF this year is a tech conference with a Trump cameo. Is AI its new message of social good?
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Good morning from Davos, Switzerland where I’ll be on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum conducting interviews with the globe’s AI leaders. You can expect Big Technology Podcast episodes this week with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon, Cohere Chief AI Officer Joelle Pineau, Sierra CEO Bret Taylor, and more. Stay tuned for the full set of details below.
Already, you can tell this is going to be a weird WEF. The event has long been a place where the world’s businesses profess their interest in social good. But the message hasn’t been landing in recent years. Many firms have shed the do-good approach and more nakedly embraced the bottom line. And politics have followed a similar track (or led it, really) with self-interested policy winning over save-the-world platforms. With the pretense lifted, what is this annual gathering of Davos for?
One answer is artificial intelligence. AI will definitely be the new thing corporations talk about as they attempt to sell their altruistic side to the world. No less than 48 sessions over the five day WEF program will discuss AI, and the panels seem ready to position AI as the world best hope to cure cancer and empower the disempowered.
Walking the promenade, I’ve seen houses for Anthropic, Writer, Mistral, and more within a few minutes of where I’m staying. And I’m typing this in the shadow of a multi-story ‘AI house.’ Business will be done here, but perhaps more notably, AI’s Davos takeover is just another example of the technology’s broader envelopment of the business world and beyond.
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Meet Marty Swant
Reporter Marty Swant is joining Big Technology as a contributor working on our new Agenda Setter emails, like this one. Swant is a veteran journalist with bylines at publications like the New York Times, Inc, and the Associated Press. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have him here!
Who’s Attending
Plenty of tech executives will be among the hundreds of global political and business leaders frolicking about Davos this week. The WEF expects record participation from governments, including 400 political leaders and 65 heads of state. Some of the biggest names in tech in business will make appearances for AI-related talks ranging from future of work and wages to creativity and ethics. Others will deal with darker realities like globalization, geopolitics, climate change, and the future of war.
Noteworthy names slated for the main program or various side events include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang; OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Others scheduled are Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis; Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp; Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch; Sierra CEO Bret Taylor and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.