
The annual World Economic Forum in Davos has long served as a crystal ball into the future of technology, and it is no surprise that this year's gathering was dominated by AI. From discussions about AI infrastructure to bold predictions about AGI, the conversations in the Swiss Alps offered a fascinating glimpse into where the industry's top minds believe we're headed. Here are six of the most intriguing AI conversations from Davos:
1. The AI Arms Race
Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI discusses the AI arms race with China and the impressive models released by DeepSeek. Specifically, he says that Chinese labs have more NVIDIA H100 GPUs than people think—DeepSeek has about 50,000!
The Trump administration unveiled the Stargate Project, a $500 billion private sector initiative led by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle.
N.B. While these videos aren't from Davos, they fueled conversations around recurring themes of AI supremacy, AI sovereignty, and AI infrastructure.
2. Timeline for AGI
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic talks about their upcoming models and features. He believes we will have very capable "virtual collaborators/agents" this year, and emphasized that over the next 2 to 3 years, he believes that we will have AI that is better than humans at almost everything.
3. Enterprise AI
Aidan Gomez, Cohere CEO, talks Enterprise AI and how with Project North, Cohere is empowering humans rather than trying to replace them. He also teases upcoming capabilities in models like continual memory.
4. Beyond Language Models
Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, says within the next 3-5 years we will see the emergence of a new paradigm of AI architectures that may not have the limitations of current AI systems.
5. Solving Big Problems with AI
Google DeepMind CEO & Co-Founder Demis Hassabis says they hope to have some of their first AI-developed drugs in clinic by the end of the year.
6. Investing in AI Infrastructure
OpenAI Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, discussed Project Stargate and the 2025 ChatGPT roadmap.
These conversations at Davos paint a picture of an AI landscape moving faster than many anticipated. Leaders from the most advanced AI labs are converging on a 2-5 year window for transformative breakthroughs. That sense of urgency is being matched by unprecedented investment in AI infrastructure by not just big tech companies, but governments worldwide. This signals that they increasingly see AI capabilities as crucial to national competitiveness. While the core of each discussion balanced optimism with caution, one thing is clear: AI is moving beyond pilots and demos to become a driving force that will reshape industries, economies, and societies in the years ahead.