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

Andy Konwinski worries that the US is losing its dominance of 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 PhD students at Berkeley and Stanford in AI right now, they’ll tell you they’ve read twice as many interesting AI ideas in the last year that came 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, but their innovations remain largely proprietary rather than open source. In addition, these companies siphon off top academic talent by offering multi-million dollar salaries that undercut what these specialists can earn at universities.

Konwinski argued that for ideas to truly flourish, they must be freely exchanged and discussed with the wider academic community. He pointed out that genetic artificial intelligence emerged as a direct result of the Transformer architecture, a basic training technique introduced into a freely available research paper.

“The first nation to make the next ‘Transformer architectural layer’ 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 source, which allows 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 diffusion of scientists talking to scientists that we’ve always had in the United States has dried up.”

Konwinski argues that this trend is not only a danger to democracy, but also a business threat to major US AI labs. “We are eating our corn seeds, the fountain is running dry. After five years, the big labs will lose too,” he said. “We have to make sure that the United States remains number one and open.”