In June, Andy Konwinski assembled around 100 influential AI researchers and engineers at San Francisco’s Exploratorium to discuss how to keep the frontier of AI research from closing. In Konwinski’s view, leaving the development of leading AI models to a handful of private companies centralizes power, posing unprecedented risks. “The frontier will not close on its own,” he told attendees. “It closes through a series of decisions.”
Konwinski grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness in rural Wisconsin. “I sold Bibles for free until I was 17,” he says. In 2013 he co-founded Databricks, a $190 billion analytics and AI company built on an open-source framework for working with large volumes of data, which Konwinski helped create as a Ph.D. student at Berkeley. He later became a co-founder of AI search company Perplexity.
Now Konwinski says he is focused on the future of open science. In 2024, he launched Laude Ventures, a $150 million fund backing technical founders that counts more than 50 leading computer scientists among its investors. By 2025, he committed $100 million of his own money to launch a nonprofit, the Laude Institute, to offer computer science researchers grant funding and direct support. Collectively, they seek to produce scientific breakthroughs others can build on and breakout companies to steward them. “The open science community needs a heavyweight contender in the ring with OpenAI and Anthropic,” says Konwinski.
One Laude-backed project, an AI benchmark called Terminal-Bench, has been used by almost every major lab to evaluate its agents. In October, the institute will announce which among the eight “moonshot” projects it backs—targeting areas from health care to civic discourse—will receive $10 million in additional funding. Though he has long since left his former faith, Konwinski is still motivated by drawing people into something bigger. “It’s more exciting to me, when the magic happens, that I feel small,” he says.
*Disclosure: *TIME has a licensing agreement with Perplexity. Investors in Databricks include Salesforce, where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO.