Artificial intelligence has dominated every conservation held At World Economic Forum in Davos, outshining the hot topics, such as Greenland dispute, tariff standoffs, and geopolitical tensions.
Besides prominent political figures, tech leaders also made significant appearances in Davos. The tech moguls, including Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, CEOs of Microsoft, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
During the conversation, the leaders shared their hopes related to the future of artificial intelligence. Some even shared their fears and on-the-horizon predictions regarding AI models. And some tech giants talked about what the future holds in this rapidly-evolving tech landscape.
Here are the key insights into AI’s present and future.
The 54-year-old billionaire participated in Davos forum and talked about his ambitions related to Tesla and robotaxis. Musk envisioned a future where it would be swarmed with robots, saturating all human needs.
xAI founder said, “Humans won't be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. There'll be more robots than people. I think everyone on earth is going to have one humanoid robot because you would want a robot to watch over your kids, take care of your pet, take care of elderly parents.”
“I think we're headed for a future of amazing abundance, which is very cool,” he added.
Musk also shed light on the timeline related to AI capabilities outgrowing humans’ intelligence.
He explained, “The rate at which AI is progressing, I think we might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year, or no later than next year, and then probably by 2030 or 2031, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.”
Jensen Huang took center stage at Davos by propagating the “AI as five layer cake.”
"This application layer could be in financial services, it could be in healthcare, could be in manufacturing. "But you can't build that top layer without everything underneath it,” Huang said.
According to the founder of the chip-maker giant, AI is quite exciting and a once in a lifetime opportunity for Europe because of its incredibly strong manufacturing base to build AI computing infrastructure.
"Robotics is a once in lifetime op for European countries," he added.
Co-founder of Anthropic regarded AI’s development as “exciting”, dubbing it as “we are knocking on the door of incredible capabilities.”
Talking about the future, the CEO said, the coming years would be highly critical for AI like how we regulate and govern this technology.
“I have engineers within Anthropic who say ‘I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it’... 100% of his contributions to Claude code were written by Claude code” for the month of December,” Amodei said.
Dario then goes on to say, “We might be 6 to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end-to-end.”
As for the future of work, the creator of Claude said, AI in coming years could eliminate half of all white collar jobs.
Microsoft’s chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, touched upon the constructive use of AI, aiming to change the outcomes of people, communities, and industries.
He also warned that AI deployment constrained by access to capital and infrastructure in a digitally unequal world would further reinforce inequality.
He called AI a "cognitive amplifier" and said companies need to start using it while workers need to pick up AI skills the same way they learned Excel.
Talking about the AI bubble, Nadella said, “For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.”
“A telltale sign of if it’s a bubble would be if all we are talking about are the tech firms rather than adopting AI applications across sectors,” Nadella cautioned.
At Davos, Harari warned against AI superintelligence. He said, “The most important thing to know about AI is that it is not just another tool... it's an autonomous ‘agent’ that learns, decides, lies, manipulates.”
"The last four years have demonstrated that AI agents can acquire the will to survive, and that AIs have already learned how to lie," he added.
Moreover, he sounded alarm about AI becoming smarter than humans and we have no experience of “building a hybrid human AI society". Therefore, humans should portray humility and a correction mechanism if things go wrong.
Yoshua Bengio, one of AI godfathers, also presented the foreboding image of a future dominated by human-like AI.
"Many people interact with them with the false belief that they [AI] are like us. And the smarter we make them, the more it's going to be like this, and there are people who make them want to look like us... But it's not clear if it's going to be good," Bengio warned.
Given the hopes and fears of tech leaders related to AI, it is no wrong to say in the coming years AI will evolve further by gaining more capabilities. The advancement without cautions also poses serious threats to humanity. In 2026, the world should focus on uniform governance of AI, so the technology could be used for the benefit of humanity.