{"id":676935,"date":"2025-06-24T00:30:22","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T21:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/databricks-perplexity-co-founder-pledges-100m-on-new-fund-for-ai-researchers\/"},"modified":"2025-06-24T00:30:22","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T21:30:22","slug":"databricks-perplexity-co-founder-pledges-100m-on-new-fund-for-ai-researchers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/databricks-perplexity-co-founder-pledges-100m-on-new-fund-for-ai-researchers\/","title":{"rendered":"Databricks, Perplexity co-founder pledges $100M on new fund for AI researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Andy Konwinski, computer scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perpelexity, announced on Monday that his personal company, Laude<\/a>, is forming a new AI research institute backed with a $100 million pledge of his own money.<\/p>\n

Laude Institute<\/a> is less an AI research lab and more like a fund looking to make investments structured similar to grants. In addition to Konwinski, the institute\u2019s board includes UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson (known for a string of award-winning research), Jeff Dean (known as Google\u2019s chief scientist), and Joelle Pineau (Meta\u2019s vice president of AI Research).<\/p>\n

Konwinski announced the institute\u2019s first and \u201cflagship\u201d grant of $3 million a year for five years, and it will anchor the new AI Systems Lab at UC Berkeley. This is a new lab led by one of Berkeley\u2019s famed, Ion Stoica, current director of the Sky Computing Lab. Stoica is also a co-founder of startup Anyscale (an AI and python platform) and AI big data company Databricks, both from tech developed in Berkeley\u2019s lab system.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The new AI Systems Lab is set to open in 2027 and, in addition to Stoica, will include a number of other well-known researchers.<\/p>\n

In his blog post<\/a> announcing the institute, Konwinski described its mission as \u201dbuilt by and for computer science<\/a> researchers \u2026 We exist to catalyze work that doesn\u2019t just push the field forward but guides it towards more beneficial outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not necessarily a direct dig at OpenAI, which started out as an AI research facility and is now, arguably, consumed by its enormous commercial side. But other researchers have fallen prey to the lure of money as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For instance, popular AI researcher Epoch faced controversy when it revealed that OpenAI supported the creation of one of its AI benchmarks that was then used\u00a0to unveil its new o3 model. Epoch\u2019s founder also launched a startup with a controversial mission to replace all human workers everywhere with AI agents.<\/p>\n

Like other AI research organizations with commercial ambitions, Konwinski has structured his institute across boundaries: as a nonprofit with a public benefit corporation operating arm.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s dividing his research investments into two buckets that he calls \u201cSlingshots and Moonshots.\u201d Slingshots are for early-stage research that can benefit from grants and hands-on help. Moonshots are, as the name implies, for \u201clong-horizon labs tackling species-level challenges like AI for scientific discovery, civic discourse, healthcare, and workforce reskilling.\u201d<\/p>\n

His lab has, for instance, collaborated with \u201cterminal-bench,\u201d a Stanford-led benchmark for how well AI agents handle tasks, used by Anthropic.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

One thing to note, Konwinski\u2019s company Laude isn\u2019t solely a grant-writing research institute. He also co-founded a for-profit venture fund launched in 2024. The fund\u2019s co-founder is former NEA VC Pete Sonsini. As TechCrunch previously reported, Laude led a $12 million investment in AI agent infrastructure startup Arcade. It has quietly backed other startups, too.<\/p>\n

A Laude spokesperson tells us that while Konwinski has pledged $100 million, he\u2019s also looking for, and open to, investment from other successful technologists. As to how Konwinski amassed a fortune enough to guarantee $100 million for this new endeavor: Databricks closed a $15.3 billion funding round in January that valued the company at $62 billion. Perplexity last month secured<\/a> a $14 billion valuation, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Does the world really need yet another AI \u201cgood for humanity\u201d research or with a murky nonprofit\/commercial structure? No, and yes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

AI research has become increasingly muddled. For instance, AI benchmarks designed to prove that a particular vendor\u2019s model works best have become plentiful these days. (Even Salesforce has its own LLM benchmark for CRMs<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

An alliance that includes the likes of Konwinski, Dean, and Stoica supporting truly independent research that could one day turn into independent and human-helpful commerce could be an attractive alternative.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andy Konwinski, computer scientist and co-founder of Databricks and Perpelexity, announced on Monday that his personal company, Laude, is forming a new AI research institute backed with a $100 million pledge of his own money. Laude Institute is less an AI research lab and more like a fund looking to make investments structured similar to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":676936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/GettyImages-1211462615.jpg?resize=1200,900","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[77337,153308,153244,153708,70917,151477],"class_list":["post-676935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-ai-research","tag-databricks","tag-perplexity-ai","tag-startups","tag-venture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}