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While AI leaders hailed AI for its potential to boost productivity and enhance work, significant attention was given to disruption of the workforce and the need for more equitable progress through reskilling and programs to mitigate inequality.
The mainstage session at the World Economic Forum was packed, as Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang talked of the “five-layer cake” of energy, chips, compute, cloud data centers, AI models, and applications.
“Most people think the AI models are where AI is,” but the applications are where Huang said the “economic benefit” will happen. He explained to moderator Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO, “AI natives” across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, robotics and other sectors will lead the next massive wave of economic growth.
While he said last year was incredible for AI, because AI models made progress, this is the year Huang believes companies will move beyond simple demos and toward large-scale commercial use: “This is the largest infrastructure buildout in human history. We are a few billion dollars in right now, but there are trillions-of-dollars of infrastructure that have to be built out, and it’s sensible, because all of these contexts have to be processed so that the models can generate the intelligence necessary to power the applications that ultimately sit on top,” said Huang, pointing to what he said is “extraordinary growth” in the energy sector, the chip sector, and computer sector, with companies like TSMC, Samsung, Foxconn, Wistron, Quanta and others producing the systems that comprise “AI factories.” This highlights his belief Taiwan will play a crucial role in powering Nvidia’s next AI wave of manufacturing and development.
After Huang’s talk, AI came up when discussing healthcare, particularly in the session, “At the Cusp of Healthcare for All,” in which Bill Gates took part in a panel that explored the practical uses of AI to revolutionize healthcare delivery.
Other conversations explored AI’s impact across a range of sectors, from enabling intelligent, predictive risk management in finance to optimizing smart grids and accelerating renewable energy integration.
Today, day 4 of the WEF, the focus shifted toward societal impacts of AI, and the ethical, governance, and labor market implications of it. The session, “Town Hall — Dilemmas around Ethics in AI” brought together experts like MIT’s Max Tegmark and Signal Foundation’s Meredith Whittaker to debate the philosophical and social challenges of AI, including accountability and the preservation of human moral agency as autonomy shifts to algorithms.
Also discussed were physical AI and autonomous systems, with Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian stating in a WEF podcast that bridging AI’s “woeful” data gap could save lives and tackle climate change: “Robots that fold our laundry might sound futuristic, but don’t justify a new way of operating. And AI that reads our email or searches the web in new ways, won’t tackle the world’s biggest problems,” said Loosararian. Instead, he believes AI and robotics should be doing more to tackle stubborn challenges, like infrastructure failure, to protect lives and prevent catastrophes. He said big data gaps have held back innovation for the physical world, advocating for smarter approaches so that infrastructure can improve efficiency and safety in sectors like manufacturing or mining, all while reducing emissions.
“In New York [State], there’s like 17,000 bridges. Only about 17 of those bridges are not in need of immediate repairs. And the reality is, it’s actually quite hard to know what bridges are the most high priority. So the best way to understand that is you go out and collect the information in data sets. And typically it’s done by humans.” Rather than having a person dangling from a rope, taking 100 ultrasonic readings, Loosararian said it should be robotics and AI that bring a convergence of the physical and digital worlds to “unlock what’s important, beyond a chat system.” According to Loosararian, “high-fidelity data is the way to improve governance and decision making.”
He took part in another session, “The hardest advances in robotics are behind us” joining Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, as well as Shao Tianlan, founder and CEO of Mech-Mind. During the discussion, Rus highlighted how robots are freeing up time for port workers, operating 24/7 to move shipping containers. The panel noted that robots still require remote control by a human operator, and agreed that fully autonomous robotics are still a number of years away. They believed that as robotics’ costs come down, robots will become a part of everyday life.
Tying to AI and robotics was continued labor-market debate. For example, in “What makes the U.S. economy exceptional?” Deloitte Global CEO Joe Ucuzoglu noted that labor market displacement was a concern, but that “unimagined jobs” would also be created. “The integration of AI into established organizations is complex, and the resulting labor market disruption is inevitable.” He emphasized that governments and businesses must coordinate retraining programs and phased adoption to prevent social backlash.
BlackRock’s Fink, co-chair of the WEF, spoke of prosperity and equitable progress, and the fact “It cannot be measured by GDP or market caps of companies. It has to be judged by many people who see it, who can touch it, can feel it, and can build their own future on it.” He said “dialogue is the only way a room like this can earn the legitimacy to shape ideas for people who aren’t in the room.”
After Fink’s talk, Ukraine President Volodymry Zelensky was scheduled to speak, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump took the stage to talk about Greenland, Minnesota, trade and tariffs, regional security, AI development, nuclear power, housing affordability, migration, and pandemics. The biggest takeaway came in relation to Greenland, when Trump said, “I won’t use force to attain it.”
Trump’s nemesis, Gavin Newsom, spoke of sovereignty and Democracy, likening the cancellation of his scheduled USA House speech to what he sees happening in the U.S. He urged that complicity give way to bravery, and he addressed Canadian Prime Minister Carney’s contention that there’s a rupture to “the world order.” Newsom said it’s not binary, and that there is a way to “go back to the relationships that are currently dormant.” Newsom said there is a path back from “insult politics.” He added, “writing an Op-Ed no longer cuts it.”
