Fireside Chat: Ali Ghodsi and Andy Konwinski
ANDY KONWINSKI: Yeah. ALI GHODSI: Question of norms. ANDY KONWINSKI: That's continued at Databricks. We announced ...
Cofounder, Databricks
Search every verified Andy Konwinski interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. At a fireside chat during a Databricks summit on August 9, 2026, Andy Konwinski discussed the company's early days, recalling his initial interactions with cofounder Ali Ghodsi at Berkeley and Ghodsi's contributions to the research project. He also spoke about ongoing work in AI evaluation, mentioning a collaboration with Stanford professor Ludvig Schmidt on benchmarks and the launch of the K Prize at NeurIPS, which includes a personal pledge of a million dollars to the first team achieving a specified performance threshold. Konwinski also shared views on the pace of AI transformation, comparing it to the decades-long adoption of the electric engine, and expressed concerns about benchmark contamination, stating a desire for "ground truth" in model evaluation. He noted that while frontier labs focus heavily on superintelligence, he finds it inspiring that students remain motivated by the opportunity to build impactful tools during what he called "the best time in the history of our species" for AI work.
ANDY KONWINSKI: Yeah. ALI GHODSI: Question of norms. ANDY KONWINSKI: That's continued at Databricks. We announced ...
Keynote talk by Andy Konwinski at CAIS 2026, making the case for open AI infrastructure. Recorded May 27, 2026. Speakers & affiliations: Andy Konwinski, Co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI, Founder of Laude Institute Session: Welcome & Keynote 1 · Wednesday, May 27, 9:00 AM Key terms: open AI infrastructure ("the stack"), compound AI systems, open weight frontier models, thriving in scarcity, Terminal-Bench, Marin, Common Crawl, diffusion of innovation, open vs. closed labs ACM Digital Library: N/A. Keynote, not part of the peer reviewed proceedings, no individual DOI. (Proceedings:…
Alex and Ellis sit down with Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, to talk about his new effort Laude, which is putting over $100 million behind AI researchers to keep their work in the open. They discuss why top researchers are turning down millions to stay in academia, what happens to open science if the closed labs win, and why Andy thinks the AI industry has a serious communication problem. They also get into Anthropic's recent Fable controversy, the dystopian views some researchers privately hold, and how Andy used Claude to help his family navigate his mother's cancer…
Join Turing Award winner David Patterson and Databricks/Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski as they discuss a new paradigm for high-impact research at the Science x AI Summit 2026 (Palo Alto). In this conversation, they detail the launch of the Laude Institute, a $100 million initiative designed to fund "moonshot" scientific projects that traditional government and corporate models often overlook. Key Takeaways: The Laude Institute's Mission: A new funding experiment providing seed grants and multi-year support to researchers across 47 institutions to tackle humanity's hardest problems, incl…
From co-founding Databricks and Perplexity to launching the Laude Institute*—a dual venture fund and nonprofit designed to turbocharge the path from *research breakthrough to breakout company*—*Andy Konwinski is building the infrastructure to recreate the Databricks motion at scale: fund researchers doing open work, help them ship products that matter, and turn paradigm-shifting ideas into trillion-dollar companies. We caught up with Andy live at NeurIPS 2025 to dig into the origin story of Laud ("right resource, right researcher, right time"), why the Databricks founding model (eight co-found…
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 founde…
Title: Shaping AI for the Public Good via the Berkeley Lab Model Speaker: David Patterson (UC Berkeley) and Andy Konwinski (Laude Institute) Date: June 3, 2025 Abstract: This three-part talk summarizes the underlying philosophy and best practices of the Berkeley lab model, offers a perspective on improving AI’s impact, and describes a new research funding opportunity starting this Fall. Senior computer scientists and rising stars in AI developed a balanced perspective on AI's societal impact informed by interviews with 24 experts including John Jumper, Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Eric Schm…
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