The fight to keep AI research in the open
Andy Konwinski is building an open counterweight to the big AI labs. Also: Midjourney tea, Amazon's chip move, and concepts of a plan.
Andy Konwinski has a phrase for where the AI industry is headed if nothing changes: “feudalism with better branding.”
Two or three companies end up owning the foundational resource, while everyone else rents access on their terms. Konwinski co-founded Databricks and Perplexity, helped build Apache Spark, and is now spending $100 million of his own money through the Laude Institute he co-founded to keep that future from coming true.
The problem Konwinski and his colleagues at Laude have landed on is the hollowing out of academia by the frontier labs and Big Tech, which are publishing less and less research publicly. Pay gaps between higher ed and the labs have widened from roughly 2-3x a decade ago to over 10x today. The highest payers also increasingly control the frontier compute that researchers need to do the work.
On this week’s episode of ACCESS, Konwinski says his worry isn’t safety so much as who gets to define the future of AI. “There’s a difference between safety and centralized control,” he says. “The threat to democracy of centralized control is real.”
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Laude turns one year old next week, and Konwinski has moved fast. The institute has handed “Slingshot” grants to 15 research teams (one built a benchmark Dario Amodei name-checked for the Claude 4 launch) and is backing “Moonshot” labs run by people like Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Terence Tao’s group at UCLA, with a board that includes Google’s Jeff Dean and Cohere’s Joelle Pineau.
From where I sit, few people command as much respect across the research community as Konwinski. Earlier this week, Ellis Hamburger and I sat down with him in Pasadena for the podcast. We also discuss:
The AI community’s backlash to Fable. When Anthropic shipped its new Fable model, it quietly downgraded certain kinds of use, including cyber and bio questions and anything resembling AI research or distillation, to Opus without disclosing it. Export controls then locked out foreign nationals, including Anthropic’s own (and Laude-affiliated) Andrej Karpathy. Konwinski argues that the bigger issue wasn’t just the policy itself, but that a single company felt it had the authority to decide who could access a foundational capability.
His answer isn’t to outspend the labs. It’s to build an open ecosystem that fights differently. “They fight in roads, we can fight in ditches,” he says, betting that scarcity breeds innovation and that an open ecosystem can own the benchmarks and context layers that decide what models optimize for.
He sees a leadership crisis in AI. Alongside the consolidation of power, Konwinski's biggest worry is what he calls "an absence of leadership.” The incentives for CEOs and VCs are “completely wrong," he argues. Part of that vacuum is the researchers themselves. "AI researchers have left society behind entirely," he says, and are largely out of touch with how people feel when data centers go up in their backyards.
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