.@ssankar says Palantir was able to make Nvidia's Nemotron Ultra model "better than frontier": "I literally almost felt gaslit when, within 24 hours of getting Nemotron up with no post-training, this is vanilla Nemotron Ultra, it did better than frontier." "If you just looked at the numbers, you would say, 'It's nowhere near the Frontier. That shouldn't even be possible.'" "But of course, the benchmarks are wrong. I mean, the benchmarks are right for what the benchmark's measuring, but that's not my business. Those are not the tasks my customers had that they were trying to solve."

.@DavidSacks says Palantir CEO Alex Karp is brilliant and completely correct: companies must own their means of production if they don't want to transfer their alpha to OpenAI and Anthropic. "Enterprises are at risk of transferring their knowledge, their know-how, their trade secrets and their customer data to model providers who might eventually decide to compete with them." "Enterprises are waking up to this threat, and they're not happy about it. I think Karp is exactly right about that." "What safety means for an enterprise is—they get to control their own data, their model weights and their compute, so a frontier lab can't hoover up their proprietary knowledge, their alpha, and turn it into their next product." "Look at what happened to Figma. Anthropic 'blindsided' its then business partner with the launch of Claude Design." " Anthropic's chief product officer even served on Figma's board and didn't resign until three days before the launch of Claude Design." "This is not an isolated example." "Anthropic has also launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, Claude Financial, and of course, Claude Code." "Every single one of these vertical apps expanded into categories that was previously served by companies building on top of Anthropic's own models." " They're watching where the value is being created on top of their models, then they're moving in directly." "The pattern is clear. They are going to use their dominant position in the model to then grab more and more territory in any interesting and lucrative vertical." " Back to Alex Karp's point: if you're an enterprise customer or a developer, why in the world would you ever want to share any proprietary data with them?" "You are mortgaging your future. You're sealing your fate. You are going to lead to disaster for your company." Via @theallinpod @jason @chamath @friedberg

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: "When OpenAI or Anthropic especially are talking about critical infrastructure—it only is being used in our product. My product." "Just so you see I'm not throwing shade—Dario is a literally historic figure." "He came from behind, and he's now number one." "I've been in business for a long time. Never seen anything like this." "The reality is—critical infrastructure does not run these models without an application layer. In almost all cases, and maybe it won't be all cases someday, that application layer is our ontology. That's a fact." Via @CNBC

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says enterprises want to "own the means of production" instead of "transferring their alpha" to OpenAI or Anthropic: "Why are [LLMs] charging for tokens if it's so valuable?" "If it was so valuable—let's say I can make you a billion dollars tomorrow. Wouldn't I say, 'I'll make you a billion dollars, and I want 30%?'" "Look at our financials. The reason why everyone is chillaxing with bad financials and growth while losing money, is the client refuses to pay the true cost." "The two places that actually make money—profit, free cash flow—are our application layer called ontology, and compute." "We can get the frontier application to be exactly the same as a frontier model without the risk of transferring the alpha of your business to another." Via @CNBC

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on OpenAI's @sama and Anthropic's Dario Amodei: "Something has gone completely wrong, and the basic view among enterprises in this country is, "I'm going to chillax, waste my time with tokens, get no value, and they're going to get my IP." "There's nothing more fun than debating Dario in private." Via @CNBC

“If you talk about risk, let me tell you about why there’s really no risk at all.” Peter Thiel explains how @elonmusk convinced him to bet Founders Fund on SpaceX: “The internal version in Silicon Valley of both Tesla and SpaceX were that they could never succeed.” “I had a conversation with Elon about this in the summer of 2008.” “I asked him when the last successful new car company had been created in the US?” “The answer was Jeep in 1941.” “You could say, ‘There’s been no new car company in 67 years, therefore it must be very hard and you should not do it.’” “The alternate version that Elon gave was, ‘It’s been 67 years. So it’s about time for a new car company.’” “One of the tremendous advantages that Tesla and SpaceX had was that they were competing with really sclerotic businesses.” “It turned out that the fact that nobody thought it was doable, and nobody had done it in a long time, paradoxically created a big opening.”

Peter Thiel on how to be a good contrarian: “It has to be contrarian and true.” “People characterize me as contrarian—It’s misleading.” “1+1=3 is contrarian. Not interesting. Untrue. Won’t get you anywhere.” “It has to be unconventional.”

.@elonmusk says he was literally “all in” betting everything he owned on Tesla and SpaceX when his third rocket failed and Peter Thiel stepped in to save SpaceX: “My buddies from PayPal saved my butt.” “Peter Thiel’s been a big supporter. He invested in SpaceX at an important time in 2008. Before orbit. After our 3rd failure but before success:” “Big credit to Peter and @LukeNosek and the other guys at @foundersfund. Basically my buddies from PayPal.”

Many people forget that @elonmusk is a self-taught aerospace engineer. Elon explains why he thought he was qualified to be the CTO of SpaceX: “I read a lot of books, and talked to a lot of smart people.” Via @60Minutes

.@elonmusk on the chart showing Raptor’s design progress: “You see Raptor 3—it looks like it’s got parts missing.” “It’s very, very clean.” “We’re pushing the limits of physics here.” Via @joerogan

“It was vertically integrate, or die.” @elonmusk explains exactly when a company should vertically integrate: “The top suppliers would not work with us, or we would get their D team.” “Which team would you give to the startup everyone’s saying will go bankrupt?” “We tried outsourcing.” “You need a fast feedback loop with engineering. If that feedback loop is all the way out in Thailand—there’s just no way.” “Let’s say there’s a problem with the cells—you’d only find out it didn’t work 5 months later.” “That’s a recipe for disaster.” Via @thirdrowtesla @wholemars @battleangelviv @Gfilche @Kristennetten @vincent13031925 @Sofiaan @kimbal

“It became clear AGI was 10 years away. Maybe 30. But the company was going to be out of business in 12 months.” Peter Thiel said fraud was so bad at PayPal, the woman running the fraud dept cried herself to sleep every night and they tried building AGI just to stop it. “There are some things computers are much better at than humans. There’s some things humans are much better at than computers.” “There were 20 investigators looking for needles in a haystack.” “We had a team of mathematicians and computer scientists trying to build an AGI system to track down all the bad people.” “The critical answer was figuring out the right division of labor where computers would screen through things. And then humans would qualitatively investigate them.” “That turned out to be incredibly powerful.” At the 2009 Singularity Summit

.@elonmusk on why it’s so hard to get rid of fraud in the government: “At PayPal— we tried to manage fraud down to 1% of payment volume.” “That was difficult. It took a tremendous amount of care to get fraud merely to 1%.” “Now—imagine an organization with much less caring, and much less competence.” Via @collision @dwarkesh_sp

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on how AI leaders talk about concerns over trust, wealth, and AI-driven layoffs: “It's like a cluster fuck.” “Could it be worse?” “It's like: We're going to take your job. We're not going to give you anything. We're going to get very wealthy. We don't talk in a way one could easily understand what we're saying. In many cases, we're talking our playbook.” “The reality is that there is no class of people that has as little support as tech leaders in this country.” “And there is an issue: how much wealth can one very small group of people have without pissing off people or giving them a sense that this is not a fair—maybe potentially rigged—game?” Via @AmerCompass with Teamsters President Sean O’Brien

OpenAI CEO @sama on UBI and AI leaders proclaiming AI is going to steal everyone’s jobs and we’ll all have no purpose in life: “That’s horrible.” “I think it’s a terrible message.” “We have failed to articulate as an industry how people stay in control of determining the future at every step, and have a meaningful life.” Via @CNBC @davidfaber

.@elonmusk says the innovators he admires the most are Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Henry Ford: "Henry Ford is more awesome than people realize. He basically invented mass manufacturing of complex objects." " Ford created the automotive industry of Earth, really." " He pretty much started what became General Motors and then he got kicked out of that or something. And then started Ford Motor Company and really developed mass manufacturing of complex objects." "And then everyone pretty much copied him." Via @forbes

.@elonmusk says he had no mentors. He found his mentors by reading biographies: “Something like Ben Franklin’s autobiography and the biography written by @WalterIsaacson is really good.” “He was an entrepreneur. He started from nothing and was a runaway kid basically. Created his printing business and then over time did science and politics.” “He’s certainly one of the people I most admire.” Via @kevinrose

.@elonmusk on why thinking from first principles is the best way to invent new things: “You boil things down to the most fundamental truths” and reason up from there. “You can’t say nobody wants a car because horses are great, we’re used to them, they can eat grass, and there’s lots of grass. And there’s no gasoline that people can buy—so people are never going to get cars.”

Palantir CEO Dr. Alex Karp on his PhD: “I went to Frankfurt and got a PhD in Neoclassical Social Philosophy, which is a fancy way of saying—a quick path to being unemployed.”

.@PalmerLuckey: American companies don't actually have engineers anymore. "American companies have been hollowed out." "We're not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore." "We're not teaching designers how to actually design things to be manufactured." "We're teaching them how to be high-level design shops that put together a design package, that gets sent to the real engineers in China—and they actually figure out how to do the work." "People are turning into architecture astronauts." "They pick components, and they put them in a nominal layout." "But the real work of—how am I actually going to put this together? How am I going to build a manufacturing line to make this? How am I going to need to figure out how to do the one, two, three, four, five different revisions of this board to pass radio emissions and interference standards? That's all done in China. So they are the real engineers." Via @HooverInst