Andy Konwinski

Andy Konwinski, who made his name as a co-founder of both Databricks and Perplexity and last year launched the venture fund Laude, offered some blunt views on how the US was in danger of losing the AI race to China, due to disinvestment in academic research.

At the beginning of the year, when Chinese AI company DeepSeek released its model, the industry was obsessed with low-cost open source models and whether they’d undercut all the major models from the frontier labs.

Today the bigger question is likely whether the US is ceding the open source battlefield to China entirely. Laude VC founder Andy Konwinski argued that the topic has implications not just for the future of AI research and development in the US, but the future of an open society. “I think democracy’s fucked if we do this.” Konwinski was also the co-founder of data software company Databricks, which was built on top of an open source technology.

“The world’s brightest minds already, the world’s best Chinese nationals, many of them are opting to stay in Beijing instead of coming here and building their company on American soil,” Konwinski said.

Making a plea to the big US AI labs, who’ve shown middling to little interest in open source, he said the problem is also a business issue for them. “The fountain is drying up. Fast forward five years, the big labs are gonna lose too. We have to do something.”