Whilst Greenland and Donald Trump monopolised most of the headlines at Davos this year, AI remained a key topic of conversation amongst business and technology leaders.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis took the stage for their first joint appearance since Paris last year. Amodei stood by his prediction that AI capable of matching human performance across all cognitive tasks could arrive by 2027. Hassabis remains slightly more cautious, giving 50% odds by the end of the decade. He also offered a 50/50 probability that simply scaling current methods will be enough to reach AGI, though he believes a handful of additional breakthroughs, fewer than five, may still be required. DeepMind’s strategy, he explained, is to pursue both paths simultaneously: “scaling what works and inventing what’s missing”.
Both pointed to the same critical variable: AI systems that can build and improve other AI systems. Amodei suggested this self-improvement loop could close within six to twelve months for software engineering. “I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore,” he noted.
The employment picture drew particular focus. Both CEOs flagged entry-level roles as the first to feel the impact. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva echoed this, describing AI’s effect on the labour market as a “tsunami” and urging leaders to “wake up”. IMF research suggests 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be touched, with entry-level positions two to three times more likely to be automated than management roles.
Perhaps the week’s most striking moment came when Amodei publicly criticised Nvidia, his own investor, over US chip sales to China, comparing the policy to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”.
Takeaways: What stood out at Davos was the consensus. AI CEOs, the IMF, and business leaders like Jamie Dimon all pointed to the same thing: entry-level roles will be hit first, the timeline is short, we may see a jobless boom, and institutions are not keeping pace. A WEF survey found the more a CEO understands AI, the more convinced they are that workforce displacement is coming.