Databricks, Perplexity co-founder pledges $100M on new fund for AI researchers

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 trying to make investments structured just like grants. Along with Konwinski, the institute’s board contains UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson (recognized for a string of award-winning analysis), Jeff Dean (generally known as 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 a yr for 5 years, and it’ll anchor the brand new AI Techniques Lab at UC Berkeley. This can be a new lab led by one in all Berkeley’s famed, 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 massive information firm Databricks, each from tech developed in Berkeley’s lab system. 

The brand new AI Techniques Lab is about to open in 2027 and, along with Stoica, will embody numerous different well-known researchers.

In his weblog put up 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 sector ahead however guides it in the direction of extra useful 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 business facet. However different researchers have fallen prey to the lure of cash as properly. 

For example, well-liked AI researcher Epoch confronted controversy when it revealed that OpenAI supported the creation of one in all 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 all over the place 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 reskilling.”

His lab has, for 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 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 in search of, 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 really want one more AI “good for humanity” analysis or with a murky nonprofit/business construction? No, and sure. 

AI analysis has develop into more and more muddled. For example, 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 actually unbiased analysis that would in the future flip into unbiased and human-helpful commerce may very well be a beautiful different.