Davos 2025 – USA, China, AI & climate
- Paweł Konzal
- Feb 28
- 3 min read
The annual Davos Economic Forum took place a week ago (20-24 January 2025). Three conclusions emerged from the discussions of 3,000 key decision makers and opinion makers from more than 100 countries. First, the return of the U.S. to a global leadership role. The enthusiasm of the heads of major companies and optimism about US economic growth was commensurate with the pessimism about weak growth in the EU.
Second, huge expectations about the role and development of artificial intelligence in the coming 18-24 months and its impact on economic growth and the social situation. Interestingly, contrary to popular opinion, the AI-related technology race will not necessarily be limited to the US and China - as discussed below.
Third, as a consequence of the development of artificial intelligence and data centers, there will be two big challenges in the coming years: a surge in demand for electricity and the need to re-educate most workers in all sectors.
After the collapse of the USSR, it was clear that the only superpower was the United States. The last decade has seen an evolution toward a multipolar world. Last week, however, showed that one country is a pole bigger and stronger than the others. The decisions and actions of the newly sworn-in U.S. president have been a focal point for discussions about politics, geopolitics, the economy, business and society.
There is a consensus of optimism about the strength of the U.S. economy in talks among CEOs of major companies. The anticipated deregulation of the economy combined with tax cuts will be a strong wind in the sails for US corporations. The strength of optimism about the US economy is proportional to the pessimism prevailing in the European economy. There was consensus on this issue as well - on the need to reduce bureaucracy and the regulatory burden on our continent.
The strongest - if not the only one indicated last week - source of hope is Poland which is again the fastest growing EU economy and is one of only two - among the five largest EU countries - with a stable government.
It is difficult to overestimate the magnitude of expectations for artificial intelligence development in the coming 18-24 months. Undoubtedly, the leaders of the race, especially when it comes to basic and large language models, are China and the US. In the middle of the week, China released a new model - DeepSeek-R1. The surprise is due to its quality rivalling the best OpenAI and Meta models in some parameters at an incomparably lower cost. It was built in 2 months for less than 1/10th of the cost of training models in the US ($6 million versus $60-100 million), using only 2,000 older-generation GPUs - compared to the 10-16,000 latest-generation GPUs used by OpenAI and Meta.
The consequence of an 80-90% drop in the cost of training models will open up the possibility of building their own AI systems for many countries. According to the head of government services in the United Arab Emirates, AI models and having adequate computing power in the 21st century will be what electricity was in the 20th century. - every country will have to build its capacity.
What does this mean for Poland? First, we should capitalize on the conviction of key decision-makers and public opinion leaders about the prosperity of our economy and the stability and predictability of the Polish government. Second, we should make every effort to take advantage of the potential of the talent we have at our disposal and become fully involved in the development of AI and related technologies. IdeasLab can be a center of competence from which further initiatives can develop. Third, efforts to build new sources of clean energy on a large scale - nuclear energy in particular - should be strengthened, as well as to educate Polish women and men so that we can skillfully use new technologies. We have an opportunity to be one of the leaders in the emerging economic transformation and new industrial revolution. Let's take full advantage of it.
