Key Points
- Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski warns that the U.S. is losing its lead in AI research to China.
- He says top U.S. AI labs are keeping their innovations proprietary, while China is encouraging open-source development.
- Konwinski argues that this trend is an “existential” threat to democracy and a long-term business risk for U.S. AI labs.
- He believes the U.S. needs to foster a more open and collaborative research environment to stay ahead.
Andy Konwinski, a co-founder of Databricks and the AI firm Laude, is worried that the U.S. is losing its top spot in AI research to China. He calls this shift an “existential” threat to democracy.
“If you talk to PhD students at Berkeley and Stanford in AI right now, they’ll tell you that they’ve read twice as many interesting AI ideas in the last year that were from Chinese companies than American companies,” Konwinski said at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this week.
While major U.S. AI labs like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic are making big strides, they are keeping their innovations secret rather than sharing them as open-source. These companies are also hiring top academic talent with huge salaries, draining universities of their best minds.
Konwinski argued that for big ideas to really grow, they need to be shared and discussed openly in the academic community. He pointed to the “Transformer architecture,” a key technique that led to the generative AI boom, which was first introduced in a freely available research paper. “The first nation that makes the next ‘Transformer architectural level’ breakthrough will have the advantage,” he said.
In China, Konwinski explained, the government encourages AI innovations from labs like DeepSeek and Alibaba to be open-sourced. This allows others to build on them, which he believes will lead to more breakthroughs. He contrasted this with the U.S., where he says, “the diffusion of scientists talking to scientists that we always have had in the United States, it’s dried up.”
Konwinski believes this trend is not just a risk to democracy but also a business threat to the major U.S. AI labs. “We’re eating our corn seeds; the fountain is drying up. Fast forward five years, the big labs are gonna lose too,” he warned. “We need to make sure the United States stays number one and open.”
