Be The Best, Not The First
How Palantir is benefiting from the current technological revolutions and why they are already winning the AI race without making lots of noise
On December 7th, Palantir announced they were making room inside the company for 180 Jewish students who felt threatened in their Universities. We all saw the testimony given by the presidents of UPenn, MIT and Harvard, and their inability to condemn those pursuing harm on Jewish students. Palantir did what makes them unique in today’s world; they took a position. You cannot say you “strongly condemn” without doing so. You need to take a side sometimes, to show the world that you not only have values, but that you live by them. You push your thinking beyond words.
Something is changing, and Palantir is fully aware of this situation. This convergence of different events are not coincidental, and the leadership of the company knows. The decision was quickly made some weeks ago, when the war broke out between Hamas and Israel, and everyone understood their assignment and the role that Palantir needed to play to better establish itself as a beacon of light and hope for the future of the western way of life, of our own way of life.
It’s not casual that Alex Karp, CEO and Co-Founder, has said in a number of TV appearances and interviews that they are 1 of just 3 companies that have publicly said they are pro-Israel, among Anduril and Booz Allen. My guess is that virtually every public software and defense company in the US has this position, but not in public.
The reality is that 20 years ago every single organization doing business in the US would have publicly condemned the actions that took place on Oct. 7th of this year, and there’d be no debate against anyone doing so. If there was consensus then, today there’s a vacuum, and the people at Palantir know it, they are ready to lead the charge and they can take the pressure. Those protests against the ICE contract only made their skin thicker. Whereas a large part of the metropolitan mainstream TikTok-zombies will shout as loud as they can against Palantir, the vast majority of common sense people will silently agree, because they known that their work is not only important, but necessary.
The known unknowns of this world are slowly revealing themselves, and a binary system is emerging, more evident by the day. There’s right and there’s wrong. Public debates need to take place. Education needs to leave the classroom and go back to families and homes. Values, values and values.
When ChatGPT was made available to the public, a big shift happened in the whole software industry. Urgency meant quick action, and companies vulnerable to that precise change and disruption that OpenAI brought to the table needed to either compete or die. Microsoft decided to bet in favor and acquire 50% of the business, while others rushed to develop a competitor. Palantir stood silent.
They quickly realized that developing an alternative to ChatGPT would waste time, money and talent, and that their efforts would be better spent in the next chapter of AI bots, K-LLMs.
LLMs are like mad scientists. Don't ask one mad scientist when you can ask a committee of mad scientists. - Palantir CTO, Shyam Sankar
They already figured that countless chatbots would appear, and that would mean an equal amount of headaches in determining which to use for what need. We’ve all seen companies compare their AI assistants to the others, saying they performed better in this and that exam. Why bother competing when you can work on a platform to make them interact with each other and extract the best possible answer from the same question?
When the US sends billions of dollars to Israel or Ukraine, to name the most recent cases, to defend themselves, what are the senior officials who meet in a hotel talking about? The small print is what matters. The how is almost more important than the what. Because no institutional announcement will specifically award Palantir with the task of rebuilding the whole of Ukraine infrastructure, or specifically require Palantir to be the sole guardian of the well-being of the Iron Dome. But those running the countries, the unelected high-ranking officials, are the ones who do.
They know exactly which provider can perform a task more efficiently than others, for what price and in what terms. Here is where Palantir comes in. Wonder why they’ve been hiring former DoD officials? Because they know exactly how the government works. They know how to navigate a level of bureaucracy only the United States of America government has. It’s intricate, complicated but exciting. Why waste millions of dollars trying to develop internal solutions for specific tasks when there’s a more viable, more affordable platform that at the same time can achieve better results not just for this, but for other use cases? Even the law forced the Pentagon to select Palantir because they offered a better solution.
And when these officials meet behind close doors to discuss the conditions and distribution of the billions that Congress has given them, they may bring up that company that was detrimental to keeping Kyiv from falling in the first 3 days of the Russian invasion.
Palantir’s story is not about being the first (although they have been in important times in history), but about waiting, discussing, thinking, planning and when they are ready, coming up with a way of thinking, a kind of language that will end up being the ink with which everyone does business. Foundry has never been about being a platform, it’s meant to be the vessels through which blood efficiently gets to all the organs.
The same with Gotham and the same with Apollo. AIP is already following the path that Foundry began. Only time will prove if we were right or we were wrong.