Databricks, the co-founder of Perplexity engages $ 100 million on a new fund for IA researchers
Andy Konwinski, computer scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perpelexity, announced on Monday that his personal company, Laude, formed a new AI research institute with a commitment of $ 100 million in his own money.
The Laude Institute is less a research laboratory on AI and more as a fund that seeks to make structured investments similar to subsidies. In addition to Konwinski, the Institute’s board of directors includes the professor of UC Berkeley, Dave Patterson (known for a series of award-winning research), Jeff Dean (known as Google chief scientist) and Joelle Pineau (Vice-President of IA research).
Konwinski announced the institute’s first subsidy and “flagship” of $ 3 million a year for five years, and he will anchor the new AI systems laboratory in UC Berkeley. This is a new laboratory led by one of the famous Berkeley, Ion Stoica, current director of Sky Computing Lab. Stoica is also co-founder of Anyscale Startup (an AI and Python platform) and the Big Data Company data company, both developed in the Berkeley laboratory system.
The new AI systems laboratory should open its doors in 2027 and, in addition to Stoica, will include a number of other well -known researchers.
In his blog article announcing the institute, Konwinski described his mission as “built by and for computer researchers … We exist to catalyze a job that does not simply push the ground forward but the guide towards more beneficial results.”
It is not necessarily a direct excavation in Openai, which started as a research installation on AI and is now, no doubt, consumed by its enormous commercial side. But other researchers also fell prey to the appeal of money.
For example, the popular researcher of IA Epoch was faced with controversy when he revealed that Optai supported the creation of one of his AI references which was then used to unveil his new O3 model. The founder of Epoch also launched a startup with a controversial mission to replace all human workers around the world with AI agents.
Like other AI research organizations with commercial ambitions, Konwinski has structured his institute through borders: as a non -profit organization with an operational arm of the public benefits company.
He divides his investments in two buckets which he calls “slides and moon strokes”. Flows are intended for starting phase research which can benefit from subsidies and practical assistance. The blows of the moon are, as its name suggests, for “laboratories on a long horizon take up challenges in terms of species such as AI for scientific discovery, civic discourse, health care and reskilling of the workforce”.
His laboratory has, for example, collaborated with “Terminal-Bench”, a reference led by Stanford for the way in which AI agents manage tasks, used by Anthropic.
One thing to note, the Konwinski company, Laude, is not only a research-writing institute. He also co-founded a for-profit venture capital fund launched in 2024. The co-founder of the fund is the former VC Pete Sonini of the NEA VC. As Techcrunch, Laude, previously brought in an investment of $ 12 million in the AI Arcade agent infrastructure startup. He also quietly supported other startups.
A Laude spokesperson tells us that even if Konwinski has promised $ 100 million, he is also looking for and opens up investments from other successful technologists. As for the way Konwinski has raised a fortune enough to guarantee $ 100 million for this new company: Databricks closed a financing cycle of $ 15.3 billion in January, which estimated the company at $ 62 billion. Perplexity last month also obtained an evaluation of $ 14 billion.
Does the world really need another research on the AI ”good for humanity” or with a disnteited non-profit / commercial structure? No, and yes.
AI research has become more and more confused. For example, AI benchmarks designed to prove that the model of a particular supplier works better has become abundant these days. (Even Salesforce has its own LLM reference for CRMS.)
An alliance which includes tastes of Konwinski, Dean and Stoica supporting truly independent research which could one day turn into independent and thickening human trade could be an attractive alternative.
