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Databricks co-founder wins prestigious ACM award, says 'AGI is here ...
Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed the email telling him that he was the 2026 recipient of the ACM Prize in Computing. “Yeah, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch. Back in 2009, the tech Zaharia developed for his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the tutelage of famed professor Ion Stoica, was launched into Databricks. Zaharia had created a way to dramatically speed the results of slow, clunky, big data projects and released it as an open source project called Spark. Big data was in those days what AI is today and Spark turned the tech industry on its ear. The 28-year-old Zaharia became a tech celeb. Since then, he has helmed the engineering at Databricks, growing it into a cloud storage giant and now a data foundation for AI and agents. Along the way the company has raised over $20 billion — valuing it at $134 billion — and hit $5.4 billion in revenue. The Silicon Valley dream. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery issued him the award for his collective contributions. The award comes with a $250,000 cash prize that he is donating to an as-yet-to-be-determined charity. Zaharia, who in addition to his CTO duties is also an associate professor at UC Berkeley, is looking forward, not back. Like everyone else in the Valley, the future he sees is filled with AI. “AGI is here already. It’s just not in a form that we appreciate,” he told TechCrunch. “I think the bigger point of it is: we should stop trying to apply human standards to these AI models.” Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 A person, for instance, can only pass the bar exam to be a lawyer if they’ve integrated vast amounts of knowledge. But an AI can ingest vast amounts of facts easily. If it answers knowledge questions correctly, that doesn’t equate to general knowledge. This tendancy to treat AI like a human can have some profoundly negative impacts. He offers the example of the popular AI agent OpenClaw. “On the one hand, it’s awesome. You can do so many things with it. It just does them automatically,” he said. But it’s also “a security nightmare” because its designed to mimic a human assistant that you trust with things like passwords. That leads to the risk of being hacked, or the agent spending unauthorized money from your bank because your browser is logged in. “Yeah, it’s not a little human there,” he says. As a professor and product engineer, Zaharia is most excited about how AI can help automate research on everything from...
Databricks CEO Just Dropped The Most Honest Advice About The ... - LinkedIn
Data company leaders aren’t interested in histrionics and hand-waving Here’s a little secret for you. The next wave of AI success is going to be completely dependent on structured data. Maybe that’s a no-brainer to you. Maybe I’m telling you that the next time you take a drink of water, that water will be wet. But I believe that prediction, and the fact that it’s kinda clear already, is the reason why you get a certain sense of calm when the CEOs of these massive data companies talk about the future of AI. They’re confident, but thoughtful. Open-minded, but not susceptible to hyperbole, histrionics, and hand-waving. They don’t say things like all software developers will be replaced by AI (the deadline for which has since passed) or all tech employees should become baristas and bartenders (the dream is over, nerds) or don’t worry, we’ve hammered out all the unintended consequences for letting users create their own AI porn (what could go wrong?). Instead, the data CEOs say common sense things like ““Why would you move your system of record? You know, it’s hard to move it.’” Holy crap. I think I’m in love. SaaS Goes Into the Woodchipper Recently, data giant Databricks “announced it reached a $5.4 billion revenue run rate, growing 65% year-over-year, of which more than $1.4 billion was from its AI products.” So a quarter of their revenue is now AI. That doesn’t shock me, doesn’t surprise me, doesn’t concern me. That… is palatable hypergrowth, if such a thing exists. And I assume that a big chunk of the remaining 75 percent of the revenue is coming from SaaS, and the rest of it is stored Pirate Bay collections. Now, I said that SaaS was dying a long time ago, in fact, I’ve called its imminent demise a couple times. Real readers know that when I say “SaaS is dying,” I’m not saying that your favorite productivity number-cruncher will immediately disappear off the internets. What I’m talking about is that the usefulness of the SaaS business model is waning, based on its intractable UX problem – “SaaS companies,” for over a decade, have existed to throw crunched numbers back at sometimes-certified superusers to analyze. At the same time, AI is, theoretically anyway, offering executives and leaders actionable insights, options, and answers. What I wrote were warnings, cautionary tales, a heads up on the iceberg. Stop marching along blindly with the traditional SaaS business model now to not get caught in the wood chipper later. The reason I wade into h...
"Marathon is gonna be Game of the Year," actor Ben Starr says, because ...
Of course, Mewgenics is going to be Game of the Year in the only awards that matter (my choice) but sadly I think this year's awards are already locked in for GTA 6 unless Rockstar Games somehow ...
AI/BI concepts - Databricks on AWS
AI/BI concepts Databricks AI/BI is a new type of business intelligence product designed to provide a deep understanding of your data's semantics, enabling self-service data analysis for everyone in your organization. AI/BI is built on a compound AI system that draws insights from the full lifecycle of your data across the Databricks platform, including ETL pipelines, lineage, and other queries ...
