Frontier AI research requires up to $100B, far exceeding NSF budgets
Andy Konwinski · [State of Research Funding] Beyond NSF, Slingshots, Open Frontiers — Andy Konwinski, Laude Institute · Dec 31, 2025 · at 14:12
Andy Konwinski discusses why government NSF funding is insufficient in scale for modern frontier AI research requirements.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Andy Konwinski
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”