Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed the email telling him he was the recipient of the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing. “Yeah, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch.
In 2009, the technology Zaharia developed for his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the guidance of renowned professor Ion Stoica, was launched at Databricks.
Zaharia had created a way to dramatically speed up the results of slow, boring, big data projects and released it as an open source project called Spark. Big data was then what AI is today, and Spark is back the tech industry on its ear. 28-year-old Zacharias became a tech celebrity.
Since then, he has taken over engineering at Databricks, growing it into a cloud storage giant and now an AI and agent data foundation. Along the way, the company has raised over $20 billion — valuing it at $134 billion — and reached $5.4 billion in revenue. The Silicon Valley dream.
On Wednesday, the Computing Machinery Association presented him with the award for his collective contributions. The award comes with a $250,000 cash prize that he is donating to a yet-to-be-determined charity.
Zaharia, who in addition to his CTO duties is also an associate professor at UC Berkeley, is looking forward, not back. Like everyone else in the valley, the future he sees is filled with AI.
“AGI is already here. It’s just not in a form that we appreciate,” he told TechCrunch. “I think the most important point is: We should stop trying to apply human standards to these AI models.”
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A person, for example, can pass the bar exam to become a lawyer only if he has incorporated vast amounts of knowledge. But an AI can absorb vast amounts of facts easily. If he answers knowledge questions correctly, this does not equate to general knowledge.
This tendency to treat AI as human can have some profoundly negative effects. He offers the example of the popular AI agent OpenClaw.
“On the one hand, it’s awesome. You can do so many things with it. It just does it automatically,” he said. But it’s also a “security nightmare” because it’s designed to mimic a human assistant you trust with things like passwords. This leads to the risk of being hacked or the agent spending unauthorized money from your bank because your browser is connected.
“Yeah, not a bit of a man there,” he says.
As a professor and product engineer, Zaharia is very excited about how artificial intelligence can help automate research on everything from biology experiments to data collection.
Just like how vibe coding made prototyping and programming accessible to anyone, he believes that precise, illusion-free AI research will one day become universal.
“Not that a lot of people need to build apps, but a lot of people need to understand the information,” he said. Ultimately, we’ll make AI work better for us by building on its strengths: telling us what every rattle in our car means, or scanning beyond text and images to include radio and microwaves, or, what he sees students doing now, simulating changes at the molecular level and predicting their effectiveness.
“What I’m most excited about is what I would call AI for search, but specifically for research or engineering,” he said.
