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

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 a Databricks co-founder and the co-founder of the AI research and venture capital firm Laude.

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

In addition to investing through Laude, the venture 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, yet their innovations remain largely proprietary rather than open-source. Moreover, these companies are sucking up top academic talent by offering multimillion-dollar salaries that dwarf what these experts can earn in universities.

Konwinski argued that for ideas to truly flourish, they need to 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 technique introduced in a freely available research paper.

“The first nation that makes the next ‘Transformer architectural level’ breakthrough will have the advantage,” Konwinski said.

Konwinski argues that in China, the government supports and encourages AI innovation, whether from labs like DeepSeek or Alibaba’s Qwen, to be open-sourced, which allows others to build upon them and which, he contends, will inevitably lead to more breakthroughs.  

He believes this stands in stark contrast to the US, where, as he puts it, “the diffusion of scientists talking to scientists that we always have had in the United States, it’s dried up.”

Konwinski argues that this trend poses not only a risk to democracy but also a business threat to major U.S. AI labs. “We’re eating our corn seeds; the fountain is drying up. Fast forward five years, the big labs are gonna lose too,” he said. “We need to make sure the United States stays number one and open.”