The World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting of 2025, found the resort town of Davos torn between fears of a second Trump campaign and nebulous skulduggery on the applications of artificial intelligence. “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age” was the resounding theme of the event which saw speakers such as Donald Trump himself, U.N. Secretary – General António Gutierres, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy covering a wide range of topics.
Preempted by the WEF’s Global Risks Report, which saw state-based armed conflict as the top risk globally, the Davos agenda focused primarily on resilient supply chains and fostering growth through innovation. In addition, a notable shift was seen from traditional fiscal green incentives to monetizable ones, such as biodiversity credits in established carbon markets like cap-and-trade.
The AI bacchanal and simultaneous royal rumble between Microsoft partner OpenAI’s GPT, Alphabet’s Gemini, and Claude designed by Amazon-backed Anthropic, was overshadowed by forbidding concerns over a new competitor in the AI market — DeepSeek’s R1 model.
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of the hedge fund High-Flyer. The company specializes in developing open-source large language models (LLMs) and has rapidly gained attention for its innovative approaches in the AI sector.
Marc Andreesen of Andreesen Horowitz, or less commonly a16z, likened the release of China’s new LLM to the U.S.S.R.’s Sputnik — the first artificial satellite to be launched into space. A geopolitical Trojan horse that ignited the space race and arms race of the late 20th century.
The news reverberated in the equities markets as the Nasdaq Composite lost 3.07%, falling to 19,341.83, in addition to the S&P 500, which slid 1.46% to 6,012.28, Monday, in a massive AI stock sell-off spurred by the release of DeepSeek’s new AI model.
A release which was followed by President Donald Trump’s announcement of the Stargate Project, a monumental AI infrastructure venture in collaboration with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. The project, focusing on infrastructure development and economic growth, is set to invest up to $500 Bn over the next four years to bolster AI capabilities in the United States.