At the 53rd World Economic Forum (WEF), which ended this Friday, January 20, the use of technology occupied a central place in the debates due to its economic, social and environmental implications, in a world that is already accepted as "fragmented" but in which there is still room for "cooperation", as indicated by the slogan that called the meeting.

Unlike fairs and exhibitions, in which firms offer their latest innovations, in Davos -the Swiss town where the WEF takes place- ideas and concepts are presented for discussion taking advantage of an audience made up of heads of state, shareholders of multinationals, bankers and global social referents.

In the midst of urgent talks about huge inflation, continued wage and interest rate hikes, and the war in Ukraine, talks about artificial intelligence, the metaverse, the future of crypto-assets and the support of technology to meet the millennium goals also took up an important space.

AI: opportunity and threat. In Davos there were talks about the need to build  “a clear AI governance framework based on clear principles”, in the expression of Benjamin Larsen, Project Lead, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning of the WEF. Larsen noted that “despite the current recession and layoffs in the tech sector, generative AI companies continue to receive strong interest from investors”.

Generative AI generates text, images, music, voice, code or video using pre-trained Generative Transformers (GPTs) that can generate new text from the input they receive based on a large corpus of text data and with a neural network architecture based on transformers to process the input text and generate the output text.

The ChatGPT case was the most exposed due to its economic and social implications, but other generators such as Stable Diffusion and Dall-E also shone. While investors and analysts considered that these initiatives could reduce the costs of health and legal services, others warned against their tendency to consolidate the large frameworks provided by databases.

In that sense, there was consensus on the need to make progress in regulating the use of AI. For example, it was mentioned the case of the lawsuit that Getty Images filed in the United Kingdom against Stability AI, the owner of Stable Diffusion, which it accuses of having illegally extracted millions of images from its database to train its tools, violating the Copyright.

Metaverse live and direct. The WEF was held in the metaverse, as well as in person. The Forum organization launched the Global Collaboration Village, in which 80 participating organizations had a place.

The WEF metaverse ran on Microsoft's Mesh mixed reality platform. It consisted of three separate areas: the virtual congress center, suitable for attending conferences, bilateral meetings and workshops; the collaboration hubs, which offered virtual collaboration spaces for smaller-scale and deeper meetings; and the campuses, which provided a virtual exhibit booth.

Klaus Schwab, President of the WEF, observed that "with the Global Collaboration Village, we are creating the first public purpose-oriented application of metaverse technology, building a true global village in virtual space."

The WEF calculated that although the precise definition of the metaverse is still being debated, the sector will be worth US$800 billion by 2024. The organization accompanied the launch of its metaverse with two briefing papers. One of them emphasized the importance of interoperability, which allowed users to move between the physical and digital worlds with their relevant data, digital assets, and identities. The other focused on consumer applications, core technologies, and pathways to economic value and growth.

Crypto winter. The stampede of investors from the crypto world that followed the collapse of the FTX Exchange generated a polarization in the positions expressed in the WEF between those who saw in this episode a necessary corrective action and those who predicted the beginning of profound changes in that ecosystem, especially due to the introduction of strict regulation.

The WEF's own scenery showed the changes that have taken place. Until last May, when the spring version of the WEF was held, the storefronts that line both sides of the Promenade, which runs through the Swiss ski resort, were dominated by exchanges that operated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In its winter version, only a few stalls remained.

Crypto winter. The stampede of investors from the crypto world that followed the collapse of the FTX Exchange generated a polarization in the positions expressed in the WEF between those who saw in this episode a necessary corrective action and those who predicted the beginning of profound changes in that ecosystem, especially due to the introduction of strict regulation.

The WEF's own scenery showed the changes that have taken place. Until last May, when the spring version of the WEF was held, the storefronts that line both sides of the Promenade, which runs through the Swiss ski resort, were dominated by exchanges that operated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In its winter version, only a few stalls remained.