Andy Konwinski, laptop scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perpelexity, introduced on Monday that his private firm, Laude, is forming a brand new AI analysis institute backed with a $100 million pledge of his personal cash.
Laude Institute is much less an AI analysis lab and extra like a fund seeking to make investments structured just like grants. Along with Konwinski, the institute’s board consists of UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson (identified for a string of award-winning analysis), Jeff Dean (often known as Google’s chief scientist), and Joelle Pineau (Meta’s vp of AI Analysis).
Konwinski introduced the institute’s first and “flagship” grant of $3 million a yr for 5 years, and it’ll anchor the brand new AI Programs Lab at UC Berkeley. This can be a new lab led by one in every of Berkeley’s famed, Ion Stoica, present director of the Sky Computing Lab. Stoica can be a co-founder of startup Anyscale (an AI and python platform) and AI large knowledge firm Databricks, each from tech developed in Berkeley’s lab system.
The brand new AI Programs Lab is about to open in 2027 and, along with Stoica, will embrace a lot of different well-known researchers.
In his weblog submit asserting the institute, Konwinski described its mission as ”constructed by and for laptop science researchers … We exist to catalyze work that doesn’t simply push the sphere ahead however guides it in the direction of extra helpful outcomes.”
That’s not essentially a direct dig at OpenAI, which began out as an AI analysis facility and is now, arguably, consumed by its huge industrial aspect. However different researchers have fallen prey to the lure of cash as nicely.
For example, in style AI researcher Epoch confronted controversy when it revealed that OpenAI supported the creation of one in every of its AI benchmarks that was then used to unveil its new o3 mannequin. Epoch’s founder additionally launched a startup with a controversial mission to exchange all human employees in every single place with AI brokers.
Like different AI analysis organizations with industrial ambitions, Konwinski has structured his institute throughout boundaries: as a nonprofit with a public profit company working arm.
He’s dividing his analysis investments into two buckets that he calls “Slingshots and Moonshots.” Slingshots are for early-stage analysis that may profit from grants and hands-on assist. Moonshots are, because the identify implies, for “long-horizon labs tackling species-level challenges like AI for scientific discovery, civic discourse, healthcare, and workforce reskilling.”
His lab has, as an example, collaborated with “terminal-bench,” a Stanford-led benchmark for the way nicely AI brokers deal with duties, utilized by Anthropic.
One factor to notice, Konwinski’s firm Laude isn’t solely a grant-writing analysis institute. He additionally co-founded a for-profit enterprise fund launched in 2024. The fund’s co-founder is former NEA VC Pete Sonsini. As TechCrunch beforehand reported, Laude led a $12 million funding in AI agent infrastructure startup Arcade. It has quietly backed different startups, too.
A Laude spokesperson tells us that whereas Konwinski has pledged $100 million, he’s additionally on the lookout for, and open to, funding from different profitable technologists. As to how Konwinski amassed a fortune sufficient to ensure $100 million for this new endeavor: Databricks closed a $15.3 billion funding spherical in January that valued the corporate at $62 billion. Perplexity final month secured a $14 billion valuation, too.
Does the world actually need one more AI “good for humanity” analysis or with a murky nonprofit/industrial construction? No, and sure.
AI analysis has develop into more and more muddled. For example, AI benchmarks designed to show {that a} specific vendor’s mannequin works greatest have develop into plentiful nowadays. (Even Salesforce has its personal LLM benchmark for CRMs.)
An alliance that features the likes of Konwinski, Dean, and Stoica supporting really unbiased analysis that might in the future flip into unbiased and human-helpful commerce might be a gorgeous different.
