Databricks co-founder wins top ACM award, says ‘AGI is already here’

Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed an email telling him he was the recipient of an ACM Award in Computing in 2026. “Yes, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch.

Back in 2009, Zaharia tech did his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the guidance of the famous professor Ion Stoica, he was introduced to Databricks.

Zaharia developed a method to dramatically accelerate the results of slow, complex, big data projects and released it as an open source project called Spark. Much was in those days what AI is today and Spark turned technology companies on his ears. 28-year-old Zaharia became a professional engineer.

Since then, he has been an engineering supporter at Databricks, growing it into a cloud storage giant and now an AI foundation and assistant. So far the company has raised more than $20 billion – its value is $134 billion – hit $5.4 billion in revenue. The dream of Silicon Valley.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery presented him with an award for his contributions. The award comes with a $250,000 prize that is being donated to a charity that has yet to be confirmed.

Zaharia, who in addition to his duties as CTO is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, is looking forward, not behind. Like everyone else in the valley, the future they see is filled with AI.

“AGI is already here. It’s just not the way we appreciate it,” he told TechCrunch. “I think the bottom line is this: we need to stop trying to apply human standards to these types of AI.”

For example, a person can only pass the bar exam to become a lawyer if they have accumulated a lot of experience. But AI can easily point out many facts. If it answers general knowledge questions correctly, it is not equivalent to general knowledge.

The tendency to treat AI like a human can have some drawbacks. He gives an example of the popular AI OpenClaw.

“On the one hand, it’s really cool, you can do a lot of things with it, it just does itself,” he said. But it’s a “security risk” because it’s designed to impersonate an agent you trust with things like passwords. This leads to the risk of being hacked, or an agent spending money illegally on your bank account because your browser has been compromised.

“Yeah, he’s not a little guy there,” he says.

As a professor and industrial engineer, Zaharia is excited about how AI can help research in everything from biology experiments to data collection.

Just as vibe coding made prototyping and programming accessible to everyone, he thinks accurate, visual-free, AI-powered research will one day be universal.

“Not that more people need to program, but more people need to understand more,” he said. In the end we will make AI work better for us by relying on its strengths: telling us what every vibration in our car means, or looking beyond text and images to include radio and microwaves, or, what he sees students doing now, compare molecular changes and predict how they will be used.

“The thing that interests me the most is what I would call AI for research, but mostly research or engineering,” he said.