Databrick’s co-founder claims the US must go open source to beat China in artificial intelligence

Andy Konwinski worries that the US is losing its dominance in artificial intelligence to China, calling the shift an “existential” threat to democracy. Konwinski is a Databricks co-founder and co-founder of AI research and venture capital firm Laude.

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

In addition to investing through Laude, the venture fund he launched last year with NEA veteran Pete Sonsini and Antimatter CEO Andrew Krioukov, Konwinski also runs the Laude Institute, an accelerator that offers fellowships to researchers.

Major AI labs, including OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, continue to innovate significantly, but their innovations remain largely proprietary rather than open source. Moreover, these companies are luring top academic talent by offering multi-million dollar salaries that dwarf what these experts can earn at universities.

Konwinski argued that for ideas to truly flourish, they must 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 crucial training technique introduced in a freely available research paper.

“The first nation to make the next ‘Transform architectural level’ breakthrough will have the advantage,” Konwinski said.

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

He believes this is in stark contrast to the US, where, as he puts it, “the prevalence of scientists talking to scientists that we’ve always had in the US, it’s dried up.”

Konwinski argues that this trend poses not only a risk to democracy, but also a business threat to major US AI labs. “We’re eating our corn seeds; the fountain is drying up. Fast forward five years, the big labs will lose too,” he said. “We need to ensure that the United States remains number one and open.”