Dear Readers,

What does it mean when the world’s most powerful leaders stop talking about “better models” and start worrying about electricity, grids, and legitimacy - and why did Davos 2026 quietly confirm that this shift is already underway? In today’s issue, we dive straight into the three AI conversations at Davos that actually mattered, from Dario Amodei’s stark warning about runaway self-improvement, to Demis Hassabis framing AI as a transition bigger than the Industrial Revolution, to Elon Musk reframing intelligence itself as secondary to energy and physical infrastructure.

Along the way, you’ll see why AI is no longer discussed as a product cycle but as a civilizational stress test, how compute and power are becoming the real fault lines of global competition, and why China’s energy and chip buildout is changing the strategic math faster than many in the West are willing to admit. This edition is about what happens when intelligence becomes cheap, scalable, and brutally physical - and why the hardest questions ahead are no longer technical, but economic, political, and existential, so read on before the future quietly locks itself in.

All the best,

“Selling these chips would be a huge mistake. I think it’s just insanity. It’s like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”

— Dario Amodei, Davos, WEF

Davos is where the world’s most powerful people gather to perform certainty publicly. Which is why AI conversations there are so revealing: they’re one of the few places where even the best-connected leaders occasionally drop the choreography and admit what they don’t fully control.

This year, three conversations did more than recycle the usual “AI will change everything” mantra. Taken together, they sketched a single, uneasy picture: we are racing toward systems that may become broadly capable, we are not institutionally prepared for the labor, energy, and legitimacy shocks that follow, and the people building these systems don’t agree on the right speed - yet they all agree the stakes are civilizational.

The three I want to highlight are: (1) “The Day After AGI” with Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Zanny Minton Beddoes (The Economist), (2) Elon Musk in conversation with Larry Fink (BlackRock/ Interims President of WEF), and (3) Demis Hassabis’ Davos interview framing AI as an economic shift bigger than the Industrial Revolution. They are, in different registers, about the same question: What happens when intelligence becomes a scalable commodity - and power, money, and governance try to catch up afterward?