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

Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia almost missed the email informing him that he was the winner of the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing. “Yes, it was a surprise,” he told TechCrunch.

In 2009, the technology that Zaharia developed for his PhD at UC Berkeley, under the tutelage of renowned professor Ion Stoica, was launched at Databricks.

Zahria created a way to dramatically accelerate the results of large, slow, and complex data projects and released it as an open source project called Spark. Big data in those days was what AI is today and the transformation of Spark The technology industry is on its ear. 28-year-old Zaharia has become a tech celebrity.

Since then, he has led engineering at Databricks, helping grow it into a cloud storage giant and now an AI and agent data organization. Along the way, the company has raised more than $20 billion – Its value is estimated at $134 billion – The revenue run rate was $5.4 billion. Silicon Valley dream.

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the award for his collective contributions. The award comes with a cash prize of $250,000 to be donated to a yet-to-be-determined charity.

Zahria, who, in addition to his duties as CTO, is also an associate professor at UC Berkeley, is looking forward, not backward. Like everyone else in the Valley, the future he sees is filled with artificial intelligence.

“AGI is already here. It’s not what we appreciate it to be,” he told TechCrunch. “I think the bigger point is: we should stop trying to apply human standards to these AI models.”

For example, a person can only pass the bar exam to become a lawyer if he has a significant amount of knowledge. But artificial intelligence can easily absorb huge amounts of facts. If he answers knowledge questions correctly, this is not equivalent to general knowledge.

This tendency to treat AI as a human could have some profound negative effects. The example of the popular AI agent OpenClaw is given.

“On the one hand, it’s cool. You can do a lot of things with it. It does it automatically,” he said. But it’s also a “security nightmare” because it’s designed to mimic the human assistant you trust with things like passwords. This risks being hacked, or the agent spending unauthorized funds from your bank due to your browser login.

“Yes, 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 in everything from biology experiments to data collection.

Just as Enthusiastic Coding has made prototyping and programming accessible to anyone, he believes that precise, hallucinogenic, AI-powered research will one day become universal.

“It’s not that a lot of people need to build apps, but a lot of people need to understand the information,” he said. Ultimately, we will make AI work better for us by making it play to its strengths: telling us what every rattle in our car means, scanning beyond text and images to include radios and microwaves, or what it sees students doing now, simulating changes at the molecular level and predicting their effectiveness.

“The thing that interests me most is what I call artificial intelligence for research, but specifically for research or engineering,” he said.