Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder & CEO, says we have already reached artificial general intelligence, but the AI is just lacking context to be more productive. He argues that is the problem everyone should focus on right now with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on the sidelines of the Bloomberg Tech event in San Francisco.
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Questions asked in this interview
7
0:00Could there be oxygen sucked out the room in some ways for back companies such as yourselves?
0:35What is it that you are dealing with most often?
3:59And I'm not questioning if it is, but then Jensen Huang's equation of more compute, more tokens, more revenues, it means that that should put some on a trajectory to more profitability. Right?
5:11Would you look to go for public capital at this moment?
5:58Super quickly, how closely did you read the SpaceX S-1, and how closely will you track an Anthropic IPO to evaluate the future market that you want to go into?
Ali Ghodsi is with us, the CEO and cofounder of Databricks, one of the most valuable private companies that has yet to file confidentially with the SEC. As far as we know. We're gonna hold back on IPO chat for a minute and ask you about whether this moment of all of these companies looking to access capital in the public markets, is that an anxiety for you? Could there be oxygen sucked out the room in some ways for back companies such as yourselves?
Well, we're a private company. Yeah. So private investors, they're soon not gonna have all these companies to deploy their capital on. And so there's gonna be a lot of capital available in private markets. So, no, that's not gonna be a problem at all for us.
Ali, I'm really interested in what life's like for you right now as a CEO of a company of Databricks' valuation, but also, like, you know, I don't mean this sort of flippantly. Like, okay. Great. Big private valuation. The company is growing incredibly fast, you know, revenue run rate. Carol set up at the top everything that's happening in software right now. What is it that you are dealing with most often? What is it that you are sort of, I don't know, waking up and going, okay. Wow. This is today.
Yeah. My view is that we're in a very special moment because I'm a contrarian. I believe we actually already have AGI. Artificial general intelligence already arrived. We already have...
Yeah. I ask groups all the time. I ask this question. I ask, how many of you believe we have AGI? Roughly 10% of the audience usually raises their hands. Then I ask, how many of you think that the AIs that you use, the frontier models, are smarter than most of the people you work with most of the time? And 90% of any crowd, I've done this, like, twenty, thirty times, raise their hand. Okay? So it's already really plenty smart. We don't need AI to get smarter. It just is lacking context. If we could capture all the context of all the conversations we're having and everything that's happening in the processes...
If you could feed that to the AI, they already could be extremely productive. But no one's really focused on that problem. Everybody's focused on superintelligence, and can we, like, continue the scaling laws? And the problem is, if we just could have that context, we would have huge breakthrough. So that's what Databricks is focused on. You know, that's our only focus is how do we infuse that data context into this product we have called Genie, which then can help answer and automate questions. I think this is the most important question that people should focus on right now.
And we've got plenty new products. Like, as you're getting ever higher valuations, you're backing it up with new offerings. I think about Lake Base. I think about some of the M&A that you've been doing in the market to beef up the product offerings. What's hitting home at the moment? What are the customers demanding of you?
Yeah. As you said, Lake Base is, you know, everyone wants these databases. People are not paying attention to databases. Everybody's paying attention to software is being commoditized because AI can produce software. But what they don't think about is that all software needs a database. It's a fact. You cannot have a piece of software, and it's not using a database. And Lake Base is really, really, really tailoring to those agents. So, you know, for instance, Stripe uses Lake Base, and they're using, they put all their KPIs in it. And that way, the agents can actually start answering questions on all the KPIs that they have because, you know, everybody's using agents now.
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Ghodsi, A. (2026, June 4). Databricks CEO: We Don't Need AI To Get Smarter [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Technology. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/961245/
MLA
Ali Ghodsi. "Databricks CEO: We Don't Need AI To Get Smarter." Bloomberg Technology, 4 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/961245/.
BibTeX
@misc{ghodsi2026_961245,
author = {Ali Ghodsi},
title = {Databricks CEO: We Don't Need AI To Get Smarter},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Technology. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/961245/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
