Billionaire Databricks and Perplexity Co-Founder Pitches AI Researchers to Not Work for Big Tech

The billionaire co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI, Andy Konwinski, is singularly focused on plugging the years-long drain of talent from academia to Big Tech.

He wants to encourage academics to focus on publishing more openly available research, a reaction to the move by frontier AI companies to reduce the amount of AI research they publish as they race against one another to develop the best models and AI tools. 

While Google, in particular, has long been known for its research publishing, a 2026 Stanford report noted that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google no longer disclose details about the software used to train their AI models, how much computing power they used, and the size of their training datasets — crucial points that could help researchers replicate the companies’ successes.

“There are many reasons—like fundamental, societal-level, defend-democracy reasons—that open research needs to survive,” Konwinski told me at the Association for Computing Machinery’s AI conference in San Jose. He pointed to a well-known Google research paper from 2017 that would later become the basis of today’s most popular AI models and chatbots.