Alex Karp continue to drag the AI labs — while defending one of their leaders, Dario Amodei.
The Palantir CEO spent July outlining his thesis for “sovereign AI.” Firms should want to keep their data, he said; they shouldn’t fork it over to a third-party like OpenAI or Anthropic. (You might remember that testy CNBC interview.)
In an all-hands meeting, Karp continued to lay out his theory — and rip into his AI competitors. He called the companies “wildly unlikable.”
“They are actually unwilling to respond to any questions about: How do you build the models without ripping off someone’s IP, migrating your alpha to your model, and then competing against them?” he said. “They do this over and over.”
As in previous interviews, Karp said that he was speaking for enterprises, not from his personal opinion. He didn’t find the AI companies “unlikable,” he said.
“I’ve spent a lot of time with Dario,” Karp said, referring to the Anthropic CEO. “He’s not the caricature that many people, most Americans, believe.”
Tokens have been a sticking point for Karp. The unit of AI measurement determines how much companies pay for the technology. In June, he compared tokenmaxxing — or spending as much on AI as possible — to porn addiction.
Once again, Karp took aim at tokens. He said that Palantir’s customers were asking: “Why am I paying for tokens that lead to this weird kind of slop that only makes the least productive people happy?”
Palantir popularized the “forward-deployed engineer” model, making it one of the hottest jobs in tech. Google and AWS have both invested in FDEs; OpenAI created a dedicated organization for them.
Karp said in June that OpenAI ripped Palantir off (poorly). In the all-hands, he painted a graphic picture of the forward-deployed engineers, saying that AI companies needed “FDEs that aren’t just masturbating and selling tokens.”
“That’s what these are actually doing,” Karp said. “They sell tokens.”
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