Nathaniel Whittemore

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes.

Given that we are recording this one a little bit early, our main topic is actually a bit of a catch-up on last week.

The World Economic Forum, of course, happened in Davos.

All throughout last week, we covered a couple of the big conversations, the AGI timeline conversation from Demis Hassabis and Dario Amadei, among other things.

But overall, what was the vibe there?

I will say before I get into that, that I sometimes don't even want to cover this type of news, because I think that more or less, for those of you who are just trying to understand what AI is going to mean for you, how it's going to impact your career, your company, your job,

Ignoring basically everything that happens in the types of conversations that go on at a place like Davos, ignoring all the conversation around markets and infrastructure build-outs and bubbles, you'd basically be better off taking all of that time that you would spend thinking about what people were jabbering about and instead taking that time to just go figure out how to build with these tools.

Yet, of course, we live in the world that we live in, and like it or not, the conversations that happen in Davos are a useful reflection on what global leaders think about this moment, and so give us insight into the context in which this industry and this technology is going to operate.

One side of the conversation was the voices coming from the tech industry.

Reuters summed up that voice as jobs, jobs, jobs.

The AI mantra in Davos as fears take a back seat.

Now that is a specific reference to Nvidia's Jensen Huang, who basically made the argument that the amount of demand for chips, the infrastructure layer that needs to be built, the energy infrastructure that needs to be built to service it, is all a big moment of job creation.

And indeed, I think it is the case that fairly uniquely relative to other moments of creative destruction, even the transitional moment has the potential for a lot of creation as well.

I think Jensen is right to identify that there is a lot more skilled labor outside of knowledge work that needs to be developed for this transition.

In other places, tech leaders talked about the productivity benefits that they were seeing.

Cisco talked about projects that had been too tedious to even contemplate before that could now be done in a couple of weeks.

IBM's chief commercial officer, Rob Thomas, said that AI was at the ROI stage.

He told Reuters, you can truly start to automate tasks and business processes.

TechCrunch said that even though we anticipated AI being a big topic of conversation, the extent to which it shaped the event, with even the physical surrounding being dominated by tech companies and pavilions, was notable.

And yet, of course, if the technology folks were excited, concerns about AI-related job displacement were on the agenda as well.