Andy Konwinski is worried that the U.S. may be losing its edge in AI research to China, describing this trend as an “existential” threat to democracy. As a co-founder of Databricks and the AI research and venture capital firm Laude, he has a front-row seat to these developments.
Speaking at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this week, Konwinski noted, “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.”
In addition to his work with Laude, which he launched last year alongside NEA veteran Pete Sonsini and Antimatter CEO Andrew Krioukov, Konwinski also heads the Laude Institute, an accelerator providing grants to researchers.
While major AI labs like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic continue to make significant advancements, most of their innovations remain proprietary rather than open source. Additionally, these companies are attracting top academic talent with salaries that far exceed what researchers can earn in universities.
According to Konwinski, for ideas to thrive, they must be shared and discussed openly within the academic community. He highlighted that generative AI was born from the Transformer architecture, a groundbreaking training method introduced in a research paper that was publicly accessible.
“The first nation that makes the next ‘Transformer architectural level’ breakthrough will have the advantage,” Konwinski stated.
He emphasized that in China, the government actively supports AI innovation from labs like DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, promoting open-source practices that enable further development and lead to new breakthroughs.
In contrast, Konwinski believes that the U.S. is seeing a decline in the collaboration among scientists that has historically been key to its success. “The diffusion of scientists talking to scientists that we always have had in the United States, it’s dried up,” he remarked.
He warns that this trend not only threatens democracy but also poses a business risk to 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 cautioned. “We need to make sure the United States stays number one and open.”
