Andy Konwinski has expressed worries that the U.S. is ceding its leadership in AI research to China, describing this trend as an “existential” danger to democratic values. Konwinski helped found Databricks and is also a co-founder of Laude, an AI research and venture capital organization.
“If you ask AI PhD students at Berkeley or Stanford today, many will say that in the past year, they’ve come across twice as many compelling AI concepts from Chinese firms compared to American ones,” Konwinski remarked during the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this week.
Alongside his investments through Laude—a fund he started last year with Pete Sonsini, formerly of NEA, and Andrew Krioukov, CEO of Antimatter—Konwinski also oversees the Laude Institute, which supports researchers with grant funding.
Leading AI organizations such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic are still making major advances, but most of their breakthroughs are kept proprietary rather than being shared openly. These companies are also attracting top academic minds by offering salaries far higher than what universities can provide.
Konwinski maintained that for innovation to thrive, ideas must circulate freely and be discussed within the broader academic sphere. He highlighted that generative AI owes its existence to the Transformer architecture, a crucial training method that was first introduced in an openly accessible research paper.
“Whichever country achieves the next major breakthrough on the scale of the Transformer architecture will gain a significant edge,” Konwinski stated.
According to Konwinski, China’s government actively promotes and supports the open sourcing of AI innovations from labs such as DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, enabling others to build upon them and, in his view, paving the way for further advances.
He sees this as a sharp contrast to the U.S., where, as he describes, “the tradition of scientists exchanging ideas that has long existed in America has faded.”
Konwinski believes this development threatens not only democracy but also the business prospects of leading American AI labs. “We’re consuming our own seed corn; the well is running dry. In five years, even the biggest labs will suffer,” he warned. “It’s crucial that the United States remains both the leader and an open environment.”
