Databricks CTO Wins ACM Prize, Declares AGI Arrived

Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia has won the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing, recognizing his contributions including Apache Spark, the open-source big data tool he created during his PhD at UC Berkeley. He is donating the $250,000 prize to charity. Zaharia told TechCrunch that AGI is already here, just not in a form humans recognize, and warned against applying human standards to AI models. He highlighted security risks in AI agents and expressed excitement about AI-powered research tools that could make information analysis universally accessible.