Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia wins ACM Prize and declares AGI is already here

In short: Matei Zaharia, the Berkeley computer science professor and Databricks co-founder who created Apache Spark, has won the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing for his foundational contributions to distributed data systems and AI infrastructure. The $250,000 prize, funded by an Infosys endowment, is one of computer science’s most prestigious mid-career honours. Zaharia is donating the prize to charity. In an interview following the announcement, he argued that AGI has already arrived,  “it’s just not in a form that we appreciate”,  and that the field should stop benchmarking AI against human cognition.

From PhD thesis to global infrastructure

Zaharia began building Apache Spark as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley in 2009, a faster alternative to Hadoop MapReduce, which had become the default framework for large-scale distributed data processing but was burdened by slow disk-based I/O between stages. Spark moved intermediate computation into memory, cutting processing ...