Tech takes over Davos
Tech companies are showing up bigger than ever at the World Economic Forum. Also: Announcing the full Sources Live lineup.
It’s Janurary 19th in Davos, Switzerland, where I’ve been furiously clicking through cookie pop-ups all day and trying not to slip on the ice.
3 things you should know:
Last week’s discovery dump from Musk v Altman has really gotten under the skin of OpenAI’s leadership.
More Thinking Machines drama: two employees quit on Slack during an all-hands, and there have been anonymous attempts to frame a co-founder’s departure on an undisclosed workplace relationship.
A side effect of the AI bubble: “The total wealth of the individuals speaking this year as tracked by Bloomberg’s wealth index is more than four times that of the 2025 line-up.”
“There’s just nothing like it”
This morning, I trekked down the Promenade in Davos, Switzerland, to chat with Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of the stablecoin giant Circle.
Allaire is a Davos veteran who has been attending the World Economic Forum here since 2008. As a Davos newbie who had already managed to get lost on my way to meet with Allarie, I wanted to know how he thought the tech industry’s presence at the conference had evolved over the years, especially given the modern AI boom.
Tech has always had a strong presence at Davos, he told me, but it has ebbed and flowed. A decade ago, the Forum launched what it called the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a very Davos project focused on AI, quantum, blockchain, and synthetic biology. Then Covid hit, followed by the war in Europe. The agenda shifted heavily back to politics.
Now, aside from the focus on President Donald Trump’s tariff antics and return to Davos this year, AI dominates conversations. You can feel it on the Promenade. Anthropic has its first-ever “house” (as brand activations are called here), complete with merch like its “Thinking” hats. Europe’s AI darling, Mistral, has its own house. (Sam Altman isn’t attending Davos this year, and while OpenAI doesn’t have its own house, several of its top executives are working the panel circuit all week.)
Allaire noted that tech firms have generally “amped up” their physical presence with bigger, fancier houses, most of which are tacked onto the front of otherwise humble ski town buildings for the week. Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis are all speaking on the official WEF stage this year. WEF has also made a concerted push to invite a bunch of private tech startup CEOs, including Andrew Feldman from Cerebras, Dave Ferguson from Nuro, Bret Taylor from Sierra, and Mati Staniszewski from ElevenLabs.
While AI is everywhere at Davos, the illuminati class seems to have mostly moved on from being worried about its negative side effects. The results of WEF’s annual leader poll put the “adverse outcomes of AI” as the 8th most likely concern to “present a material crisis on a global scale in 2026.” The top three concerns were “geoeconomic confrontation,” “state-based armed conflict,” and “extreme weather events.”
I asked Allaire if there was anything else like Davos from a networking perspective. Sun Valley came to mind, but Allaire dismissed the comparison. “Sun Valley is very US-centric and very narrow,” he said. Davos is the only place where you can run into a head of state, a famous actor, and a billionaire tech founder in the same line for the bathroom. “There’s just nothing like it.”
Allarie’s advice for a Davos first-timer? “It’s a food desert. Eat when you can. Drink a lot of water.” And text your friends before trying to get into the hot events because the lines form fast.
The Sources Live @ Davos lineup
I’ve got a stacked series of live interviews happening this week at the Brunswick Home in Davos: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, ReflectionAI CTO Ioannis Antonoglou, Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak, Scale AI CEO Jason Droege, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth, and ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski.
I’ll be covering highlights from these conversations in the newsletter over the next few days. Full video and transcripts of each interview will be available afterwards for paying Sources subscribers.
If you have any questions you’d like me to ask or topic suggestions, please drop me a line via email, text, or the button below:
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More links
OpenAI’s Chris Lehane told Ina Fried at the Axios House in Davos that the company’s first consumer hardware device is on track for a 2026 unveiling. I’d be shocked if this first device ships in the first half of 2027, but we’ll see!
The timing of CFO Sarah Friar’s post on OpenAI’s business makes sense, given that she’s in Davos this week as part of the OpenAI delegation and will likely be having conversations about the tens of billions of dollars the company is hoping to raise for its next round.
Palmer Luckey has a nuanced take on the Meta layoffs.
ICYMI
Sources is a newsletter by Alex Heath about the AI race, featuring scoops, unique analysis, and exclusive interviews. Every week, Sources is read by thousands of decision makers in tech, finance, policy, and media. Click here to learn more.
