Andy Konwinski

Co-Founder, Databricks · 2 appearances on the record.

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Andy Konwinski is a co-founder of Databricks and the founder of Laud. He creates infrastructure to help researchers commercialize open breakthroughs and works on AI evaluation frameworks like Terminal-Bench 2.0.

9statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.11/5average debate potential → 5said about them ↓

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Andy argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
All major US AI labs stopped publishing research after OpenAI closed
“Whereas in the United States, since OpenAI closed their doors and stopped publishing, so did all the other labs.”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 19:25 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Andy Konwinski on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Andy Konwinski said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Western open AI research has lost the top spot to China
“Western open science and research discourse has no, has lost the number one spot to China.”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 18:56 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Frontier AI research requires up to $100B, far exceeding NSF budgets
“It was one billion dollars a year for computer science and that they're trying to cut that into half of that, but we need 10 to a hundred billion dollars to do frontier AI research.”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 14:12 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Insight
LLMs are commoditizing like raw compute, shifting value to abstraction layers
“Language models themselves are more like compute or GPU a generation ago, where what can we build at the layer above? And in software systems, we've traditionally thought of VMware being a great example. You have the operating system and the underlying archite…”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 7:04 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Assertion Contradicted
All major US AI labs stopped publishing research after OpenAI closed
“Whereas in the United States, since OpenAI closed their doors and stopped publishing, so did all the other labs.”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 19:25 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jeff Dean and Databricks founders invested in Konwinski's venture fund
“So the venture funding, there's 50 professors and PhDs, the top names like Jeff Dean and the top faculty at Berkeley and Stanford and my co-founders of Databricks and Perplexity who've invested in the fund.”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 2:43 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Insight
Academic lab research teams de-risk founder divorce for venture capitalists
“Years of deep scars from working together, knowing each other's ins and outs and team, like the dynamism and like the gestalt, like some is greater than the parts of working together as a team. They're great bets. So you kind of de-risked the founder divorce r…”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 4:23 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Opinion
The National Science Foundation has returned thousands of times its public cost
“It has been probably the best investment the American popular public has ever made. Thousands X return on their investments. I mentioned Google earlier, Databricks, all these researchers came from NSF funding”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 13:42 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Disclosure
Open Frontiers will gather the top 100 open AI researchers in SF
“The idea is like, let's team up. Get together one day in San Francisco in the next five months and get the hundred most influential open researchers together for conference and for meetings where we share our roadmaps and we talk about common goals amongst the…”
Andy Konwinski Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 20:43 [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute
Disclosure
Konwinski: Terminal-Bench is the largest LAWD Slingshot grant investment to date
“Terminal Bench is the largest investment we've made in any one of the slingshots so far.”
Andy Konwinski Nov 8, 2025 ▶ 26:26 Terminal-Bench 2.0: the most impt coding agent benchmark of 2025 gets a v2! Launch + Q&A w/ founders

The other half of the tape: Andy Konwinski's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 2 episodes on Latent Space. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Alex Shaw 4Shawn Wang 1

Every mention by year

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Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
[State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Dec 31, 2025 17m
Terminal-Bench 2.0: the most impt coding agent benchmark of 2025 gets a v2! Launch + Q&A w Nov 8, 2025 3m
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