There were times at this week’s meeting of the World Economic Forum when Davos seemed to morph into a high-powered tech conference, with the presence on stage Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropologie CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya NadellaAnd even more industry executives.

The big topic, surprisingly, was AI, whose CEOs held a vision for the technology’s transformative potential as well as acknowledging ongoing concerns that they were inflating a giant bubble. In between all these big-picture forecasts, they found time to take swipes at their competitors and even their ostensible partners.

In its latest episode TechCrunch’s Equity PodcastI discussed all things Davos with TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosek and Sean O’Kane.

Kirsten noted that the conference seemed to be a transition from past years, with tech companies like Meta and Salesforce taking the main promenade, while important topics like climate change failed to draw crowds. And Sean says that even if AI execs aren’t quite “Panhandling for use and more customers,” it can sometimes feel like that.

Read a preview of our full conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Kirsten: Some discussions around, say, climate change or poverty and larger global issues, [are] Doesn’t really attract crowds. Meanwhile, on the main promenade in Davos, Switzerland, some large storefronts have been converted and occupied by companies such as Meta and Salesforce, Tata, also many countries in the Middle East. And I think the biggest was USA House, which was sponsored by McKinsey and Microsoft. It really felt different visually.

And then Elon Musk was there – Sean, you and I both heard it. There wasn’t much, but I will say it was interesting that he showed up, because he’s avoided Davos in the past.

Anthony: We were trying to figure out the technology content of Davos. [and] There are absolutely things to highlight here, but it’s also interesting how, especially as AI has become such a big business story, it’s hard to completely separate it from all the other threads in terms of big questions about international trade, world politics.

One of the big headlines coming out [Davos]At least for us, there was Comments from Anthropic’s CEOWhere he basically attacked the Trump administration’s decision to allow Nvidia Send the chip to China. It’s a story that’s a technology story, but it’s also a trade story, it’s a politics story.

I think in terms of the gist of what he said, it was consistent to me in the sense that he’s usually comfortable shutting up and it’s this interesting line. [in AI discourse] Where there is an element of criticism, but it really has to do with this intense AI hype. One of the phrases he used was that an AI data center is like a country full of talent. I have questions about that – but he said, “How can we send all these chips to China if we’re worried about China? Because basically we’re sending a country of genius to China and letting them control it.”

Sean: You could probably fill a notebook with the various weird phrases these CEOs used this week. Another thing that sticks out in my mind is that Satya Nadella keeps calling data centers token factories, which is a wonderful abstraction of what he thinks they are there for.

You know, two things really stuck out to me about all the different things said by these CEOs in different parts of the week. One is that they’re definitely all kind of sniping at each other — not just Anthropic with Nvidia, which is interesting in its own right, because Anthropic is a huge Nvidia customer and uses Nvidia GPUs, and there’s an interesting tension there. But seeing them sitting next to each other and really kind of pulling, you know, sticking the knives out a little more than we’re used to seeing.

We know they are all jockeying for the lead and they are trying to retain talent without overspending to death. And it was one of the first times where it really felt like the excitement was palpable and they were there for it. These two things are often not true at the same time.

The other thing, your statement about a lot of the geopolitics of it and the business of it — that was the clearest I think we’ve gotten on record from these CEOs as far as what they think they need to continue to be successful.

Satya Nadella — I think you might read that as hostile, but I don’t think it’s that hostile — was more or less, “More people need to use this or it’s going to be a bubble and popped bubble.” He takes a very different stance in some ways than the anthropologist Dario Amadei, because Nadella’s focus is really on trying to scoop up as much use as possible. [and] How do we make sure that AI is equitable across all these different communities and across the world, versus concentrated in one place, like only rich places, that I thought was an interesting tension. But there isn’t one element of that game given away really Use and panhandling for more customers … but kind of.

And at that point, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang did something similar, where he was more or less saying, “We’re not investing enough in this, and we need more investment to be able to do this.”

Kirsten: Jensen’s comments were interesting because he really talked about it in terms of job creation, and one could offer a counterpoint to that, there will be a moment where the build out slows down, but no one is talking about that right now.

The other thing, I think, was a good point that you made, which is that we haven’t really seen them all sort of tear into each other in a room. Often you’ll be like Sam Altman at a convention or in reality [Nadella]But here they are all together. So you’re hearing it in real time.