Andy Konwinski, pc scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, introduced Monday that his firm, Laude, is forming a brand new AI analysis institute backed with $100 million of his personal cash.
The Laude Institute features much less as an AI analysis lab and extra like a fund trying to make investments structured much like grants. Along with Konwinski, the institute’s board contains UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson (identified for a string of award-winning analysis), Jeff Dean (often called Google’s chief scientist), and Joelle Pineau (Meta’s vice chairman of AI Analysis).
Konwinski introduced the institute’s first and “flagship” grant of $3 million yearly for 5 years, which is able to anchor the brand new AI Methods Lab at UC Berkeley. It is a new lab led by certainly one of Berkeley’s most celebrated researchers, Ion Stoica, present director of the Sky Computing Lab. Stoica can also be a co-founder of startup Anyscale (an AI and Python platform) and AI large knowledge firm Databricks, each constructed from tech developed in Berkeley’s lab system.
The brand new AI Methods Lab is about to open in 2027 and along with Stoica will embrace numerous different well-known researchers.
In his weblog publish saying the institute, Konwinski described its mission as ”constructed by and for pc science researchers … We exist to catalyze work that doesn’t simply push the sector ahead however guides it in 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 monumental business facet. However different researchers have fallen prey to the lure of cash as properly.
As an illustration, widespread AI researcher Epoch confronted controversy when it revealed that OpenAI supported the creation of certainly one of its AI benchmarks that was then used to unveil its new o3 mannequin. Epoch’s founder additionally launched a startup with the controversial mission to exchange all human staff in all places with AI brokers.
Like different AI analysis organizations with business 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 re-skilling.”
His lab has, as an example, collaborated with “terminal-bench,” a Stanford-led benchmark for a way properly AI brokers deal with duties, utilized by Anthropic.
One factor to notice, Konwinski’s endeavors underneath the identify “Laude” aren’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, and a Laude spokesperson tells us it has greater than 50 main researchers as LPs within the fund. 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 large enough 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 but extra AI “good for humanity” analysis or one other AI firm with a murky nonprofit/business construction? No, and sure.
AI analysis has develop into more and more muddled. As an illustration, AI benchmarks designed to show {that a} explicit vendor’s mannequin works finest have develop into plentiful today. (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 at some point flip into unbiased and human-helpful commerce could possibly be a pretty different.
Word: This story was up to date to replicate extra particulars shared in regards to the Laude VC fund.
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