Databricks co-founder warns US losing AI race to China

Andy Konwinski expresses concern that the U.S. is losing its dominance in AI research to China, describing this shift as an “existential” threat to democracy. Konwinski is a co-founder of Databricks and the AI research and venture capital (VC) firm Laude.

He noted, “If you talk to PhD students at Berkeley and Stanford in AI right now, they will tell you that they’ve encountered twice as many interesting AI ideas from Chinese companies in the last year compared to American companies.” He made these remarks on stage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this week.

In addition to his investments through Laude, which he launched last year in collaboration with NEA veteran Pete Sonsini and Antimatter CEO Andrew Krioukov, Konwinski also operates the Laude Institute. This accelerator provides grants to researchers.

Major AI labs, including OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, continue to innovate significantly; however, their innovations remain mostly proprietary rather than open-source. Moreover, these firms are sucking up top academic talent by offering multi-million-dollar salaries that restrict what these experts can earn in universities.

Konwinski argued that for ideas to flourish truly, they need to be freely traded and discussed with the larger academic community. He indicated that generative AI appeared as a direct result of the Transformer architecture, a key training technique presented in a freely available research paper.

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

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

Databricks co-founder suggests that this decline in the “diffusion of scientists talking to scientists,” which the U.S. has historically enjoyed, is in stark contrast to the current situation.

He warns that this trend is not only a danger to democracy but also presents a business risk to major American AI labs. “We’re eating our corn seeds; the fountain is drying up. Fast-forward five years, the big labs are going to lose too,” he cautioned. Konwinski emphasizes the need to “make sure the United States stays number one and open.”