Konwinski Vows Open Science Revolution Amid AI Centralization Concerns

Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, has been named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI. In June, he assembled a group of around 100 influential AI researchers and engineers at San Francisco's Exploratorium to discuss the centralization of power in leading AI model development.

Konwinski believes that leaving this development to private companies poses unprecedented risks and could close the frontier of AI research through a series of decisions. He grew up as a Jehovah's Witness in rural Wisconsin, selling Bibles for free until he was 17.

He co-founded Databricks in 2013, a $190 billion analytics and AI company built on an open-source framework for working with large volumes of data. Konwinski later became a co-founder of Perplexity and has now shifted his focus to the future of open science through Laude Ventures, a $150 million fund backing technical founders.

The Laude Institute, launched in 2025 with $100 million of Konwinski's own money, offers grant funding and direct support to computer science researchers. Laude-backed project Terminal-Bench has been used by almost every major lab to evaluate its agents.