Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and the AI research and venture capital firm Laude, stated at the recent Cerebral Valley AI Summit that the United States risks losing its lead in artificial intelligence research to China. Konwinski characterized this potential shift as an "existential" threat to democracy, citing a perceived decline in open-source contributions from U.S. entities compared to increasing output from Chinese firms.
Konwinski reported that Ph.D. students at institutions such as Berkeley and Stanford are increasingly encountering "interesting AI ideas" from Chinese companies, outnumbering those from American firms in the past year. He attributed this trend to differing national approaches to innovation, noting that while major U.S. AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, continue to develop significant advancements, these innovations largely remain proprietary rather than openly shared.
In contrast, Konwinski contended that the Chinese government supports and encourages AI innovation from its labs, such as DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, to be open-sourced. He argued that this strategy allows wider collaboration and iteration, potentially fostering more rapid breakthroughs. He cited the Transformer architecture, a pivotal training technique introduced in a freely available research paper, as a historical example leading directly to the emergence of generative AI. "The first nation that makes the next ‘Transformer architectural level’ breakthrough will have the advantage," Konwinski stated.
Furthermore, Konwinski highlighted the impact of U.S. AI labs attracting top academic talent with "multimillion-dollar salaries," significantly exceeding what these experts typically earn in university settings. This, he argued, contributes to a drying up of the "diffusion of scientists talking to scientists that we always have had in the United States." He concluded that without a renewed emphasis on openness, "the big labs are gonna lose too," describing the current situation as "eating our corn seeds." Konwinski co-founded Laude with Pete Sonsini and Andrew Krioukov, and the associated Laude Institute provides grants to researchers.
