When leaders from around the world descended on Davos, Switzerland, last week for the World Economic Forum, one of the hottest tickets was a daylong conclave about artificial intelligence and sustainability, organized by John Werner, a Brookline venture capitalist and educator.
The agenda was packed with MIT professors, along with MIT president Sally Kornbluth — so much so that while the event was promoted as “Imagination in Action: Architects of the Global Future,” many people “call it MIT AI day,” says Michael Grandinetti, a former tech exec who attended. “It’s so MIT-branded.”
The lineup also included the heads of the institute’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Media Lab, along with the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a professor at MIT and cofounder of a Boston startup, Inrupt. (Werner, the event organizer, teaches as adjunct faculty at MIT, and also works as a partner at the Cambridge venture capital firm Link Ventures.)
There were prominent non-MIT names, too, including Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca, Demis Hassabis, a 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry who was a cofounder of the AI startup DeepMind, now owned by Google, and rapper and entrepreneur Will.i.am.
Though the Chinese startup DeepSeek (of current market-busting fame) wasn’t mentioned specifically at the event, Werner says that US-China competition in AI was discussed, and that the agenda included two speakers from China.
A big focus for the event was the opportunities and risks surrounding AI, including ways that it might help support sustainability objectives — or develop into an enormous energy hog. One panel talked about the potential for AI models to run “at the edge,” in devices like laptops, tablets, and phones — rather than in centralized data centers — which is a focus of the MIT spinout LiquidAI, represented on the agenda by four executives. (That company, with offices in Boston and San Francisco, raised $250 million last month; Werner’s VC firm is among the investors.)
“There has never been a time like this with AI, and MIT and Boston talent can play a disproportionate role in dialoguing about what the future could be or should be,” Werner said.
The AI event had only about 200 seats for over 2,000 sign-ups. “There was always a really long lineup outside the door,” says Leah Ellis, a Cambridge entrepreneur who was attending her second World Economic Forum. Attendance was free, but participants had to go through a screening process.
The event ran from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. “There were literally 26 panels and fireside chats, and not a single break,” Grandinetti says. “John does not believe in taking breaks.” Ami Bhatt, a speaker at the event, says that she appreciated networking with “people from vastly different industries” — including a Tibetan monk who talked about AI and creativity. Bhatt is the chief innovation officer for the American College of Cardiology.
Werner started organizing events locally in 2009, as part of the team that produced TEDxBoston. This was the eighth time he put together an event at the World Economic Forum.
He says that he hopes to raise money this year to hire staff to help run an event series called Planet Action, which focuses on climate issues and sustainability. The most recent edition was held last November. That would change the business formula of Werner’s conferences, which sometimes have sponsors covering their costs — at Davos, the consulting firms Deloitte and Tata Consultancy Services sponsored — but otherwise throw off “zero revenue,” Werner says.
The dome at Davos for Werner’s event cost more than $1 million to rent, he says. “I’m not being paid anything,” he says. “I’m doing it because I like doing it, I can do it, and I’ve found a wedge into doing something really prominent on the world stage.”
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him @ScottKirsner.