Databricks Co-Founder Matei Zaharia Wins $250K ACM Prize in Computing, Says 'AGI Is Here Already'

TechCrunch·high signal

Matei Zaharia, creator of Apache Spark and CTO of Databricks, won the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing ($250K, Infosys-endowed) for his contributions to distributed data systems enabling large-scale ML and AI. In his TechCrunch interview he declared 'AGI is here already — it's just not in a form that we appreciate,' arguing the field should stop applying human standards to AI models. Zaharia's work spans Spark, Delta Lake, MLflow, Dolly, and ColBERT.