Databricks co-founder argues US should adopt open source to beat China in AI | TechCrunch

Andy Konwinski is concerned that the US is losing its dominance in AI research to China, calling the shift an “existential” threat to democracy. Konwinski is co-founder of Databricks and co-founder of AI research and venture capital firm Laude.

“If you talk to AI PhD students from Berkeley and Stanford now, they will tell you that in the past year they have read twice as many interesting AI ideas coming from Chinese companies than from American companies,” Konwinski said on stage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this week.

In addition to investing through Laude, the venture capital fund he launched last year with NEA veteran Pete Sonsini and Antimatter CEO Andrew Krioukov, Konwinski also runs the Laude Institute, an accelerator that offers grants to researchers.

Major AI labs, including OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, continue to innovate significantly, but their innovations remain largely proprietary and not open source. Furthermore, these companies suck up top academic talent by offering multimillion-dollar salaries that dwarf what these experts can earn at universities.

Konwinski argued that ideas can only truly flourish when they can be freely exchanged and discussed with the larger academic community. He pointed out that generative AI emerged as a direct result of the Transformer architecture, a crucial training technique introduced in an over-the-counter technology. research paper.

“The first country to achieve the next breakthrough at the ‘Transformer architectural level’ will have the advantage,” Konwinski said.

Konwinski argues that in China, the government is supporting and encouraging AI innovation, whether it comes from labs like DeepSeek or Alibaba’s Qwen, to be open source, allowing others to build on it and which, he argues, will inevitably lead to more breakthroughs.

He believes this is in stark contrast to the US, where, as he puts it, “the proliferation of scientists talking to scientists, which we’ve always had in the United States, has dried up.”

Konwinski argues that this trend not only poses a risk to democracy, but also a business threat to major US AI labs. “We’re eating our corn seeds; the fountain is drying up. Five years later, the big labs will lose too,” he said. “We must ensure that the United States remains number one and open.”