The Rundown: The World Economic Forum kicked off this week in Davos, featuring an intense focus on AI that included discussions with the industry’s top minds, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Demis Hassabis, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.
The details:
Amodei took a shot at U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent policy allowing AI chip sales to China, likening it to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”. Hassabis believes this year could see AI-driven slowdowns in junior hiring,but that AI tools could ultimately enable more skill creation than traditional paths. Nadella said no company can “just coast” in the AI era, stating that big companies that don’t keep up will “get schooled by someone small.”Amodei also said we may be just 6-12 months away from models that do “most, maybe all” of what software engineers do end-to-end.
Why it matters: Davos talks often stay abstract, but Amodei’s timeline for full AI-powered coding puts a tight deadline on the disruption we’re already seeing with tools like Claude Code. Between geopolitical warnings, labor shifts, and software upheaval, the message from AI’s leaders is clear: the window to adapt is shrinking rapidly.
Since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, many people have claimed the algorithm change ruined the platform. Musk, now admitting the “algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements,” has made the algorithm open-source.
In an X post announcing the plan a couple of weeks ago, Musk said the repository would be updated every four weeks and include comprehensive developer notes so people could easily identify what changed. With Monday’s launch, Musk said making the model open-source would allow users to see the company struggle in real-time as it attempts to improve the model.
Specifically, the open-source GitHub repository contains the X algorithm that determines what shows up on your “For You” feed on the platform — the content you find organically on your homepage.
The model overview in the repository details how the algorithm works. A high-level look shows that the algorithm takes into account both in-network content (content from accounts you follow) and out-of-network content (discovered through ML-based retrieval), then ranks it using Phoenix, a Grok-based transformer model that predicts engagement probabilities for each post.However, if you dive deeper into the repository, you can learn exactly how it works, and people are taking to X to post the breakdowns of their findings.
The bigger impact, however, is that this is the first social media platform to openly post its proprietary algorithms, which helps with transparency, as users can learn exactly why information is being served up to them and even suggest tweaks to popular issues.
Open-sourcing the model also helps spur innovation, as developers trying to launch similar platforms better understand and potentially learn how to do so on their own. Twitter is not a stranger to copycats, with the X rebranding sparking competitors such as BlueSky and Threads.
Open-sourcing the model continues a trend we’ve seen recently: companies offering more transparency and user control over the AI algorithms powering their media consumption. For example, with the launch of Sora 2and its accompanying social media app, OpenAI unveiled a new type of recommender algorithm trained on natural language. Similarly, Instagram unveiled a feature in which you can use AI to personalize your Reels feed by selecting what you’d like to see more of.
Trump’s ‘deranged’ Greenland outbursts rattle medical expert about president’s ‘fitness’
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One en route from Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., January 4, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland for the U.S. is reaching an unusual level of “pettiness,” one political science expert told The New Republic, and it’s “beyond anything” else that has happened in recent history.
On Wednesday, Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist with expertise in international relations, was interviewed for the New Republic’s podcast, Daily Blast, to discuss the latest developments in the Trump-Greenland story. In particular, host Greg Sargent pressed her on the president’s “deranged text”to the prime minister of Norway, in which he claimed that being passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize was driving his push for Greenland, as he was supposedly no longer motivated only by “peace.”
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump’s message read.
The Norwegian government, despite Trump’s insistence, is not involved with choosing Nobel Prize winners. Norway is also not the country that controls the autonomous territory of Greenland; Denmark is.
This message left many observers stunned, with one Danish leader calling it “mad and erratic,” and some American lawmakers renewing calls for Trump to be removed from office, either by impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Saunders said that while “strongly worded” messages between leaders are not uncommon, this text from Trump went beyond anything she could think of.
“It’s not that unusual for leaders to say things behind closed doors or even in diplomatic cables that are strongly worded and so forth, even in leader-to-leader [communications],” Saunders explained. “But I think this is the level of pettiness, and the accusation that Norway is somehow responsible for him not getting the Nobel Prize and that that should matter in the matter of Greenland’s sovereignty, is kind of beyond anything I think any of us have seen or even can speak about in history.”
Sargent also highlighted a reaction from Dr. Jonathan Reiner, the former cardiologist for Vice President Dick Cheney, who said that the message should raise alarms about Trump’s fitness for office.
“This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness,” Reiner said in a post to X.
Here is Alex Soros son of George talking at The WEF Davos 2026 about Donald Trump & democracy, seriously struggling to construct a semi coherent sentence.
“When I look at this regarding democracy – I think when was this great time when everybody got along?”
Elon Musk: "I don't think anyone will ultimately control digital superintelligence, any more than a chimp could control humans. Chimps don't control humans. I do think it matters how you build the AI and what values you instill in it."pic.twitter.com/rsXiXrbFtE
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Joe Raedle / Getty Images
On the campaign trail leading up to his election in 2024, Donald Trump made a plenty of bizarre promises that have fallen by the wayside. Arguably the strangest one he’s still harping about? Greenland — a massive island in the Arctic Ocean, currently a territory of Denmark, that he desperately wants to seize.
Geopolitical analysts and pundits have spilled plenty of ink over the past year trying to come up with some rational explanation for Trump’s obsession with the idea. One of the simplest, the New York Times suggests — yet somehow the most cynical — has to do with the scientific certainty that Greenland’s ice will soon melt away.
From September 2024 to September 2025, Greenland lost a staggering 105 billion metric tons of ice, according to researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute.Between 1985 and 2022, Greenland’s ice sheet has shrunk by some 2,000 square miles. These trends are sure to continue in the years to come.
Beneath all that ice and permafrost is a veritable treasure trove of minerals like graphite, zinc, and rare earths. Basically, as the climate warms and Greenland’s ice melts, more and more of those minerals will become available for extraction.
In a nakedly empire-building type of way, in other words, Greenland makes perfect sense. The only problem? Publicly, Trump disparages the very notion of climate change — meaning that if really does understand the wealth of resources that the phenomenon is opening up in colder parts of the world, he’s fibbing to his base for jaded political reasons.
“His fixation on Greenland is an admission that climate change is real,” John Conger, an advisor to the Center for Climate and Security told the NYT.
If Trump or his advisors really are intrigued by Greenland because they’re anticipating a thawing world,that puts them in good company with Trump’s longstanding allies in Russia, where the ruling oligarchy is said to be banking on a similar strategy for the country’s immense frozen expanses.
If it sounds convoluted, it’s only because other explanations for Trump’s North Atlantic fixation just don’t add up.
As economic historian and analyst Adam Tooze explains, the US has a long-standing Cold War treaty with Denmark giving the US military carte blanche to do whatever it wants on Greenland’s territory. As such, there’s no national security justification for why the US needs to own Denmark outright.
“If Greenland isn’t currently adequately defended, it might be to do with the fact that America has completely run down multiple military bases it used to maintain on Greenland during the Cold War,” Tooze said on a recent episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze.
Oil — the classic raison d’être for US intervention on foreign soil — also doesn’t apply here. (Nor Venezuela, for that matter.)
In 2021, the governing body of Greenland stopped granting oil exploration licenses, the NYT notes, due to “climate considerations, environmental considerations and economic common sense.” That news came after 50 years of unsuccessful attempts to strike black gold in the icy waters off the island’s coast, meaning oil is a very unlikely motivation.
At the end of the day, we probably won’tknow the administration’s true motivations for Greenland unless they actually pull the trigger — though if Venezuela is any indication, a straight answer is far from guaranteed.
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
AI takes center stage at WEF in Davos
Image source: WEF / The Rundown
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