Databricks co-founder says US needs to 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 the change an “existential” threat to democracy. Konwinski is a co-founder of Databricks and co-founder of AI research and venture capital firm Laude.

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

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

Major AI labs such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic continue to innovate significantly, but much of their innovation remains proprietary rather than open source. Furthermore, these companies are siphoning off top academic talent by offering multi-million dollar salaries that dwarf what professionals can earn in academia.

Konwinski argued that for ideas to truly flourish, they need to be freely exchanged and debated with the larger academic community. He noted that generative AI emerged as a direct result of the Transformer architecture, a pivotal training technique introduced in a freely available research paper.

“Countries that are the first to make breakthroughs at the next ‘Transformer architecture level’ will have an advantage,” Konwinski said.

Konwinski argues that in China, the government supports and encourages AI innovation from research institutions such as DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, and that open sourcing will allow others to build on the AI, which will inevitably lead to further breakthroughs.

He believes this is in stark contrast to the United States. In the United States, in his words, “the dialogue between scientists that has always taken place in the United States has pervaded and dried up.”

Konwinski argues that this trend not only poses a risk to democracy, but also a business threat to major U.S. AI labs. “We’re eating corn seeds. Our water sources are drying up. Fast forward five years and we’ll be losing our big research institutes,” he said. “We need to make sure the United States remains number one and remains open.”