{"id":296661,"date":"2025-11-17T08:02:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T08:02:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296661\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T08:02:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T08:02:21","slug":"databricks-co-founder-argues-us-must-go-open-source-to-beat-china-in-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296661\/","title":{"rendered":"Databricks co-founder argues US must go open source to beat China in AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy Konwinski is concerned that the U.S. is losing its dominance in AI research to China, calling the shift an \u201cexistential\u201d threat to democracy. Konwinski is a Databricks co-founder and the co-founder of the AI research and venture capital firm Laude<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you talk to PhD students at Berkeley and Stanford in AI right now, they\u2019ll tell you that they\u2019ve read twice as many interesting AI ideas in the last year that were from Chinese companies than American companies,\u201d Konwinski said onstage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this week. \u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition to investing through Laude, the venture fund<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe first nation that makes the next \u2018Transformer architectural level\u2019 breakthrough will have the advantage,\u201d Konwinski said.<\/p>\n

Konwinski argues that in China, the government supports and encourages AI innovation, whether from labs like DeepSeek or Alibaba\u2019s Qwen, to be open sourced, which allows others to build upon them and which, he contends, will inevitably lead to more breakthroughs. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

He believes this stands in stark contrast to the U.S., where, as he puts it, \u201cthe diffusion of scientists talking\u00a0to scientists that we always have had in the United States, it\u2019s dried\u00a0up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Konwinski argues that this trend poses not only a risk to democracy but also a business threat to major U.S. AI labs. \u201cWe\u2019re\u00a0eating our corn seeds; the fountain is drying up. Fast-forward five\u00a0years, the big labs are gonna lose too,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to make sure\u00a0the United States stays number one and open.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andy Konwinski is concerned that the U.S. is losing its dominance in AI research to China, calling the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,91604,27248,181,507,144,27250,154865,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-296661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-research","10":"tag-andy-konwinski","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-china","14":"tag-laude-institute","15":"tag-laude-ventures","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}