{"id":393441,"date":"2026-01-27T16:43:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T16:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/393441\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T16:43:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T16:43:10","slug":"at-davos-tech-ceos-laid-out-their-vision-for-ais-world-domination-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/393441\/","title":{"rendered":"At Davos, tech CEOs laid out their vision for AI\u2019s world domination | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week\u2019s edition is a team effort: my colleague Heather Stewart reports on the plans for AI\u2019s world domination at Davos; I examine how huge investments have followed AI companies with little to their names but drama and dreams; and Nick Robins-Early spotlights how lax regulation of autonomous driving in Texas allowed Tesla<\/a> to thrive.<\/p>\n

AI at Davos<\/p>\n

When they weren\u2019t discussing Donald Trump, delegates at the World Economic Forum last week were being dazzled by the prospects for artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Up and down the main street of the Swiss Alps town, almost every shopfront was temporarily emblazoned with the neon slogan of a tech firm \u2013 or a consultancy promising to tell executives how to incorporate AI into their business. Cloudflare\u2019s wood-panelled HQ urged delegates to \u201cconnect, protect and build together\u201d, and Wipro\u2019s shouted: \u201cDream Solve Prove Repeat.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the conference, tech CEOs laid out their hopes for how the physical manifestations of AI will blanket the world in the coming years<\/a>. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told a rapt audience about how \u201ctoken factories\u201d, as he calls datacenters, will have to be distributed across the world, to diffuse the benefits of AI globally.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, a long term, scalable solution is to have all of these token factories part of the real economy connected to the grid, connected to the telco network \u2013 and that\u2019s what will drive that scale, whether it\u2019s in the global south, or in the developed world,\u201d Nadella said.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Google was showing off the latest iteration of its Google Glasses to excited delegates; and there were endless sessions in the Davos congress centre about the technology\u2019s potential benefits \u2013 including a breathless chat with late addition to the schedule Elon Musk, though with the SpaceX IPO apparently looming, he was keenest to talk about going to Mars.<\/p>\n

Away from the glitzy shopfronts, though, there was significant concern being expressed that all this proves to be an epic bubble.<\/p>\n

In an interview with the Financial Times, DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis warned that some aspects of AI investment do look, \u201cbubble-like\u201d, but insisted that, \u201cif the bubble bursts, we [ie Google, not society at large] will be fine\u201d.<\/p>\n

Nadella offered one test for how we would know if it is a bubble \u2013 which I didn\u2019t find reassuring. \u201cA tell-tale sign of this as a bubble, is if all we\u2019re talking about are the tech firms,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Just drama and dreams: AI companies without products still score billionsMira Murati, ex-chief technology officer of OpenAI Inc, during an interview on The Circuit with Emily Chang in San Francisco, California, on 4 April 2023. Photograph: Philip Pacheco\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Much of Silicon Valley has been captivated over the past week by a \u201cvery human drama\u201d, as the Wall Street Journal<\/a> put it. Thinking Machines Lab, a startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, fired her own chief technology officer, Barret Zoph, over a relationship with a colleague and a recent lack of productivity, per the Journal. Within hours, her ex-employee \u2013 along with one of her co-founders and a third employee \u2013 had reportedly signed offers with OpenAI, which they left just last year to join her startup. The three had told her they disagreed with the direction of the company in the meeting that ended with Zoph\u2019s firing, according to the Journal. For his part, Zoph told the Journal that Murati had fired him simply for telling her he was considering another job.<\/p>\n

As dishy as the drama might be, the stakes of Murati\u2019s mess differ from a juicy celebrity entanglement that might be chronicled in TMZ or Page Six, two of my favorite publications. The stakes in San Francisco are billions of real dollars and more than $10bn potential ones. Murati\u2019s company has raised $2bn in venture capital since its founding in February 2025. It is valued at $12bn. The talent involved in these California productions \u2013 not movies but rather AI tools used by hundreds of millions of people \u2013 takes on superstar significance.<\/p>\n

Thinking Machines has released one product, Tinker, in October 2025, meant to streamline the customization of large language models, a rather niche concern in comparison with ChatGPT\u2019s ambitions to replace Google search or Claude\u2019s coding aptitude.<\/p>\n

The massive investment and resulting valuation are chasing little in terms of real offerings from the company. A new company profiled in the New York Times<\/a> last week, Humans&, has naught but a dream, an ugly website<\/a> \u2013 and several hundred million dollars. Researchers from Google, Anthropic, and Elon Musk\u2019s xAI, including one who helped develop the notorious Grok AI tool, founded the company just three months ago. They aim to facilitate collaboration between humans and machines rather than separation \u2013 \u201cinnovations in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding\u201d, per the site. If that sounds gauzy, it is because the company has not launched a product.<\/p>\n

Humans& has raised $480m from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and Google, per the New York Times. It is valued at $4.48bn. It has \u2013 say it with me one more time \u2013 not launched a product.<\/p>\n

Whatever fears of an AI bubble may be circulating, the money is still flowing, chasing after the future with an enormous but uncertain bet in the present.<\/p>\n

Teslas in Texas: the hands-off legislation of hands-free drivingA Tesla robotaxi drives on the street along South Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, on 22 June 2025. Photograph: Joel Angel Juarez\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Elon Musk announced last week that Tesla had removed human safety monitors from its Robotaxis in Austin, Texas, as the company moves to expand its autonomous vehicle business. As with most things Musk, the reality was a bit more complicated \u2013 Tesla\u2019s vice-president of software later clarified on X that the company had deployed \u201ca few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader robotaxi fleet with safety monitors\u201d.<\/p>\n

What Tesla\u2019s test-run of fully driverless vehicles did highlight, however, was the difference between how much leeway Texas gives autonomous vehicles compared with California, the birthplace of autonomous driving in the US and the home of the highest number of self-driving cars in the country. The Texas department of motor vehicles does not have regulatory authority over autonomous vehicles in the state, instead autonomous vehicles are governed by the state\u2019s transportation code. Although a new government authorization system for autonomous vehicles is set to be implemented in the coming months, there\u2019s currently no application process required for autonomous vehicle operators in the state. <\/p>\n

\u201cAutonomous vehicles on Texas roads are subject to all traffic laws and can be cited for safety violations, but do not yet require specific authorization to operate,\u201d the Texas DMV said.<\/p>\n

Also surprising is the state\u2019s lack of regulations on operating an autonomous vehicle if it\u2019s for personal, non-commercial use. As long as it complies with some stipulations, such as traffic laws and safety standards, an autonomous vehicle can drive around Texas without anyone in the car.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny motor vehicle equipped with an automated driving system may operate in this state,\u201d the Texas transportation code states. \u201cAn automated motor vehicle may operate in this state with the automated driving system engaged, regardless of whether a human driver is physically present in the automated motor vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in California, the state\u2019s department of motor vehicles requires three stages of testing and permitting for commercial autonomous vehicles. Regulators are also in the process of considering new rules<\/a> that could add even more requirements on vehicle operators. Tesla caused confusion last October when Musk announced a ride-hailing service in the Bay Area, only for regulators to say that the company did not have authorization<\/a> to operate paid or unpaid autonomous rides to the public. On the Robotaxi section of Tesla\u2019s website, it only mentions Texas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week\u2019s edition is a team effort: my colleague Heather Stewart reports on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-393441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}