Databricks co-founder Andy Konwinski stated at this week's Cerebral Valley AI Summit that the United States is ceding leadership in AI research to China, calling this trend a "existential" threat to democratic systems. Konwinski cited feedback from Berkeley and Stanford graduate students, noting that about half of the new AI ideas worth attention in the past year came from Chinese teams, a proportion significantly higher than before.

Konwinski, along with former NEA partner Pete Sonsini and Antimatter CEO Andrew Krioukov, co-founded the venture capital firm Laude in 2024, while also running the non-profit accelerator Laude Institute, which provides unconditional funding to university researchers. He criticized U.S. top laboratories such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic for both高价 hiring academic talent and keeping their core models closed-source, leading to a near-cessation of traditional free exchange among scientists.

He used the Transformer architecture as an example, emphasizing that this breakthrough technology emerged from open papers, which led to the subsequent wave of generative AI. "Once the next breakthrough on the level of Transformer appears first in China, its leading advantage will spread rapidly," Konwinski said. He believes that the Chinese government encourages projects like DeepSeek and Alibaba Qwen to be open source, allowing global researchers to continuously iterate. If the United States continues to become more closed, within five years, "big labs will also lose their technical sources."

Konwinski called for policy incentives and financial support to restore open collaboration between the U.S. academic community and industry, ensuring that "the United States remains first and remains open."