"Enterprise AI adoption is earlier than you think."
"AIP is nowhere near saturated."
"Selling the dream… Palantir executing on those ideas with operationally proven technology."
Decades of data tools
Same silos
Different outcome
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Everyone talks about model lock-in
The real issue is decision lock-in
@WOLF_Financial
Ontology is at the center but there is a lot more there, all integrated across the entire platform.
AMA about the architecture or components
@EdLudlow Everyone just wants to stay sovereign
Grok 4.7 is rolling out across the Palantir fleet.
Its a good model sir.
A new essay from Nicholas Zamiska, our board director and co-author of The Technological Republic, published in @newcriterion.
A brief summary with excerpts below.
1. It feels as if war is on the rise. And yet it isn’t. Our country’s national power, for all of the challenges of wielding it justly, has been an enormously benevolent, and indeed pacifying, force in the world over the past century.
2. The allure of soft power alone is not enough. The unwavering assumption that the moral appeal of liberal-democratic regimes, including our own, would, without military investment, win over our geopolitical adversaries and prompt the end of war has been a mistake.
3. A far more radical reshaping of Europe’s military capabilities is required. The starting point for the articulation of a strategy would be to assume that an alliance of any two out of the three largest and wealthiest European democracies—that is, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France—should be capable of decisively repelling a land invasion by Russia of Eastern Europe without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons or relying on material support from the United States.
4. In the United States, an ambivalence remains among subsets of Silicon Valley engineers in investing and building the next generation of defense capabilities. And yet is there no place for some degree of deference to our democratic system, in which policymakers appointed by officials elected by the public, and within constraints imposed by the Constitution, determine what is and is not in the national interest? Why should our nation’s largest technology companies displace the wisdom and verdict of the American people?
5. We essentially shrug as a society when the technology giants build entire business models around what amounts to an Orwellian consumer surveillance state. And yet the construction of software that advances our national security, including artificial-intelligence systems—software that gives U.S. forces a decisive advantage over our adversaries—that we have built at Palantir becomes a political flashpoint.
6. Some of the largest technological empires in the history of human civilization are essentially advertising companies. The irony is that those who resist further investment in defense and are most skeptical of collaboration between the technology sector and the state have often simply incentivized the hordes of technical talent and capital rushing to the software industry to pursue far less fraught endeavors, optimizing advertising algorithms and developing ostensibly novel ways of sharing videos and photographs on our phones, fostering arms races of other sorts, for likes and clicks.
7. We should, as a culture, be wary of rewarding those who instinctively prize the path of least resistance. If you have no unpopular views, if you sense no areas of divergence between yourself and those around you, even those whom you hold dearest, you might not have many authentic views at all.
8. Several generations now of ambitious and talented minds across the country have recoiled from public life and turned away from government work. The risk is that the Kennedys of today, the flawed and complex yet rich personalities who may have something to offer our fragile experiment in self-government, simply find their way to Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Google.
9. The unforgiving scrutiny to which we subject those in public life may have simply yielded less than we hoped. We are left instead with what often seems to be an odd roster of seemingly empty vessels, opportunists looking for a cause and seeking higher office.
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This is like having @eliano check my tweets before they go out
We’re partnering with Accenture on independent evaluation of frontier AI—part of our recent commitment to embed evaluators at Anthropic. Both we and Accenture expect to invest at least $1 billion to build capacity in this area over the next five years.
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Another Karp heater: the AI labs have repped themselves as if they do not have the sense God gave a goat, so Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are just monetizing it.
Alex Karp says the reason Palantir has been so successful is because of their willingness to be "non-mimetic":
"When the whole world said software had to be worthless—we built platforms that worked."
"When the whole world said you couldn't extend it with FDEs—we built FDEs."
"When the whole world is saying build AI slop without an ontology that allows you to put truths into the ontology and produce actual results—we stuck to our guns."
"And what did we get? We got these results."
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Progress in technology is all about breaking false tradeoffs. Palantir, has been forged, from the beginning, to help critical institutions leverage the accelerating power of digital computation without sacrificing their sovereignty or the sovereignty of their constituents. This was prescient and is more important than ever. As, today, some in Silicon Valley believe "commoditizing your complement" means commoditizing institutions and humanity itself.
In some sense, the effective accelerationists of Silicon Valley believe technology is God and the effective altruists believe they are God. The former believe that sufficiently powerful technology will automatically organize society in the way that threads the needle between the Antichrist and Armageddon, and the latter believe they are the only ones capable of creating technology and organizing society in a way that threads that needle—convienently, according to their own utility function! The AI successionists don’t even care whether we thread that needle at all.
Palantir gives us a different option: technology as an unapologetic accelerant of human curiosity and agency, yes, but also of institutional fitness. In this view, we don't have to surrender our economic sovereignty to an all-knowing model, nor cede our moral authority to the unelected engineers in SF and the well-meaning, but generally histrionic “philosophers” in Berkeley who built it. Instead, we can use ever-more powerful computation to make the pro-human institutions we select (through free markets and the democratic process), and therefore our society, radically more capable and resilient.
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AI deployment is not the hard part
The hard part is connecting powerful computation to local institutional knowledge in realtime........without destroying the institution’s sovereignty
This is what Palantir is doing
great read: @lefttailguy and @ByrneHobart
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When I yell at my kids for leaving the door open and air conditioning the whole world
So many people forget how much of the human domain is still qualitative
How does Palantir solve problems differently?
"Start with the qualitative domain, the human realities and subtle truths of the problem. Get that right and the quantitative data becomes powerful" - Stephen Cohen, Co-Founder……in 2013
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guys: I am going to run models on my home lab so no one has access to my most sensitive data.
Same guy after latest tool drops: oh you want root access to my computer, texts, photos, bank accounts, sure! guys it’s “free”!
🤦♂️
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-my caveman brain 🤯
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
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same same
OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change
"But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI."
"So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar."
"You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient."
"There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors."
"One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate."
_________
Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations:
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Karp 16 years ago…….Sometimes you have to focus on the core issues and iterate against them before you release a product…….
“If you are iterating on a problem that you want to be important 3 years from now, it’s better to have engineers figuring out what the core issues are and then iterate against them.”
“We’re long on dealing with the most important problems that we can find, dealing with them in a productized way so that they scale for the client… and because we’re long on that and short on what happens in near term, we are not planning to hire salespeople.”
He has been consistent for a very long time
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Palantir CEO Alex Karp on what model companies are really asking for when they call for regulation and why they will be nationalized.
“It's a weird twist. They're asking for societal regulation to get out of the first line of defense, which is if you build a technology that can destroy 10% of the of the world, that has civil and criminal liability attached to it.”
“The only way to deal with this kind of liability is to go to the government and say nationalize us, please.”
"Another problem we have is seemingly everyone who understands this is on some payroll."
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I posted this because we need to focus on making real benchmarks of how these models perform in real-world scenarios on real data to evaluate their efficacy.
Just like the factory is really the product, the ability to make proper evals and benchmarks is actually the important thing.
It's too easy to be distracted by the gamed public benchmarks.
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less benchmarking, more bench-making
Security Forge + Apollo solves the vulnerability detection + patching loop at scale.
Apollo is what has been running and securing Palantir for the last 15 years.
Defend the enterprise.
Security Forge, our new cyber security offering for source code vulnerability detection that moves at machine speed.
See how Chad and George used it to autonomously scan a codebase, compress 109 flags down to 10 actionable findings, and do it for $78 — so security teams know exactly what to fix and why.
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Managing these agents is nothing new for experienced parents of teens
