Andy Konwinski Is One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI

Aug 27, 2026Co-founder, Databricks, Laude, and PerplexityPillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.Cody PickensIn June, Andy Konwinski assembled around 100 influential AI researchers and engineers at San Francisco’s Exploratorium to discuss how to keep the frontier of AI research from closing. In Konwinski’s view, leaving the development of leading AI models to a handful of private companies centralizes power, posing unprecedented risks. “The frontier will not close on its own,” he told attendees. “It closes through a series of decisions.”Konwinski grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness in rural Wisconsin. “I sold Bibles for free until I was 17,” he says. In 2013 he co-founded Databricks, a $190 billion analytics and AI company built on an open-source framework for working with large volumes of data, which Konwinski helped create as a Ph.D. student at Berkeley. He later became a co-founder of AI search company Perplexity.Now Konwinski says he is focused on the future of open science. In 2024, he launched Laude Ventures, a $150 million fund backing technical founders that counts more than 50 leading computer scientists among its investors. By 2025, he committed $100 million of his own money to ...