Databricks co-founder argues US must go open source to beat China in AI

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

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

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

Major AI labs, including OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, continue to innovate significantly, yet their innovations remain largely proprietary rather than open source. Moreover, these companies attract top academic talent by offering multi-million dollar salaries, which is dwarfed by what these experts can earn at universities.

For ideas to truly flourish, Konwinski argues, they must 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 pivotal training technology that was offered for free. Research paper.

“The first country to make the next breakthrough in transformer architecture will have the advantage,” Konwinski said.

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

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

Konwinski sees this trend as not only a danger to democracy, but also a business threat to major AI laboratories in the United States. “We are eating our corn seeds; the fountain is drying up,” he said. “After five years, the big laboratories will lose, too.” “We need to make sure the United States stays number one and open.”