Palantir’s stock has been controversial, but CEO says AI isn’t a ‘hype cycle’ for the companies actually delivering
Palantir Technologies Inc. is a polarizing stock, racking up a 118% surge so far this year — but also amassing a vocal contingent of bears who’ve expressed doubts about the company’s artificial-intelligence positioning.
Chief Executive Alex Karp, however, thinks his company will emerge an overarching winner in the AI race, and he said his message to skeptics and fans is the same.
“Watch what we’re doing,” he told MarketWatch Thursday during the company’s Software for Government event in Washington, D.C. “We believe we delivered precursor technologies to the U.S. government for managing algorithms that are applicable to large language models,” which are the sort of artificial intelligence known popularly to be behind technologies like ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, Palantir is now seeing “very high” demand for its new artificial-intelligence platform.
Palantir bears have been skeptical about the company’s ability to succeed with its newer AI initiatives and turn them into serious revenue streams on a reasonable timeline. Karp said the AI efforts are already proving successful.
“You could say, well, sure, maybe there’s a hype cycle, but it’s not hype if you’re delivering and it is hype if you’re not,” he said. “And, you know, demand for what we’re delivering to U.S. commercial [customers] is something I haven’t seen before.”
In past cycles of hot technology, the biggest winners are companies that can deliver value over time, not over the short run, according to Karp. With that in mind, he sees a bright path ahead for Palantir.
“Over the next 18 months, you’re going to see a huge bifurcation between companies that have kind of promised to create value with their software, which can’t, companies that are creating value, but the value is very, very hard to quantify, and the small subset of companies that are producing quantitative, quantifiable results for commercial clients.”
Within that last group, there could be more than one player, but “almost all the value will go to us,” he said.
More generally, he thinks customers are being more discerning about choosing software vendors.
“It used to be that most people thought software was somewhat of an irrelevant trinket-slash-luxury-product,” Karp said, but “the American market has shifted so people…[are] insisting that there’s value from software.”
On the government side, he’s most excited about helping the U.S. government build an AI-generated weapons system. The application of AI in weaponry and other government contexts “requires a lot of effort” since large language models can’t interact with classified systems in an unfettered manner.
Karp said there’s one camp that believes AI will destroy the world, while another isn’t seriously concerned about the technology. He finds himself in a third camp.
“There’s a real risk to our civilization, but in the near term, the greater risk is that our adversaries build weapons systems that are better than ours and the world falls into a more violent situation,” he said.
Meanwhile, Palantir has been involved in various government initiatives around AI safety and regulation, signing a recent AI pledge that involves sharing information about the technology’s risks, and also appearing at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s summit last week that brought together various leaders in the field.
“I found it to be very productive,” Karp said of the Senate forum.
On the commercial side, he’s excited about the potential for AI to revive the U.S. manufacturing landscape — something that could take place over the “next couple years.”
One Palantir customer has found that Palantir’s technology has made it so the company “can guide the worker [to] work in a way that’s similar to Japan but not the same,” bringing about “American ingenuity and the Japanese cultural precision.”
