In the past 72 hours, leaders of some of the world’s biggest tech companies made headlines, turning up in dapper suits – but divided into two groups separated by 4,202 miles.
While some radiated optimism about US President Donald Trump’s new reign in Washington, D.C., others gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the future of science and tech, with plans larger and brighter than the Swiss Alps.
The divide was noticeable.
“Feels symbolically interesting that Zuck (Mark Zuckerberg) and [Sam] Altman are in DC while [Dario] Amodei and [Demis] Hassabis are in Davos,” an X user pointed out.
While both noteworthy events took place simultaneously at different locations, a common theme tied them together – artificial intelligence (AI).
‘Largest Computer Ever Built’
Like a bolt of lightning striking the US Capitol on January 1, Trump announced The Stargate Project: a $500 billion AI infrastructure project backed by Oracle CTO Larry Ellison, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Moreover, Son was also named chairman of the project.
“Stargate will…create over 1,00,000 American jobs almost immediately,” Trump said. An initial investment of $100 billion will be deployed immediately, as per OpenAI’s announcement.
OpenAI also said that companies like Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Oracle are the initial technology partners. “All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI – and in particular AGI – for the benefit of all of humanity.”
Trump also revoked a 2023 executive order signed by former President Joe Biden, which aimed to reduce the risks posed by AI.
These involved threats to US national security, civil health, and safety and urged companies to share the safety test results with the government. Notably, some of the industry’s biggest names favour this move.
In an interview published earlier, Aloft VC founder Crystal McKeller said, “They are (Trump and Vice President JD Vance) not going to just roll back regulations that are stifling American industry, but they are actually going to actively implement policies that will stimulate growth and encourage innovation.”
Trump also established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly the United States Digital Service (USDS). This aims to modernise federal technology and software to enhance efficiency and productivity.
The order says that agencies, as defined by the United States Code, “shall establish within their respective agencies a DOGE team of at least four employees”.
“Each DOGE team will typically include one DOGE team lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney,” the order added.
Circling back to The Stargate Project, the crux of what the infrastructure is built for is to enable AI to “create cancer vaccines, personalised medicine, and pandemic prevention”, according to Ellison. He added that it is going to be the “largest computer ever built”.
“We will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate. We will be amazed at how quickly we’re curing cancer and heart disease…” Altman said.
DC for Infrastructure, Davos for Ideas
DC was all about infrastructure to propel AI. Davos, on the other hand, was more about ideas to propel AI. While it might seem like The Stargate Project was the biggest announcement on the AI front, Davos had plenty to offer.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed that he never felt more confident than he did at that moment about the proximity of powerful AI systems. “What I’ve seen inside Anthropic and out of that over the last few months led me to believe that we’re on track for human-level systems that surpass humans in every task within two to three years,” he added.
And as if being the first mover on autonomous computer use tools weren’t enough, he announced plans to build a “virtual collaborator”, a comprehensive AI agent that can autonomously handle multiple everyday tasks.
He also said that Computer Use was just “one piece” of the company’s vision, which was to build agents for a broad range of use cases.
The “virtual collaborator”, for example, can write, compile, and check code and even communicate with other workers on Slack. This sounds a lot like what Devin, the ‘AI software engineer’, is doing.
The plethora of announcements comes as OpenAI still awaits the release of its AI agent. Moreover, the company is also reportedly raising over a billion dollars from Google, which also made a few important statements at Davos.
Demis Hassabis, Nobel Prize winner and CEO of Google’s research arm, DeepMind, announced that by the end of the year, they will “hopefully have some AI-designed drugs in the clinical trials”. He outlined a pathway of innovations beyond predicting protein structures. “Eventually, my dream would be to simulate a virtual cell.”
Hassabis was also joined by Ardem Patapoutian, Nobel Prize laureate and molecular biologist, who explained the ambitious idea of a virtual cell. He explained that this involves creating a highly detailed representation of a cell in a digital 3D environment.
“Let’s say a certain protein is expressed very highly in a cell. But when you actually look at it and see it, all of it is localised at the tip of the neuron where something very specific is happening. That’s going to give you a very different understanding than just levels of expression,” Patapoutian added.
When all is said and done, one big name remains missing. It was reported that Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, was neither at Davos nor DC. Instead, he was in China. All of these initiatives will only increase the demand for more hardware resources, specifically GPUs. Are NVIDIA and Huang the true winners in this sense?
