Alex Karp Sits Down To Discuss Software, The War, Palantir's Earnings & More | Palantir AIPCon 9

Great to be with you.

Well, you know, maybe we should ask what the customers have to say about what's happened over the last six months at Palantir. I think you should start there. Let's go right to the people, the customers. Ask the customers. We spent, we started 20 years ago saying we're going to do value creation. We're not going to take your weird category you learned at business school at Harvard probably about how to build software and build a parasitic little trinket and install it because that's what venture capitalists wanted, because that's what analysts wanted, because that's what banks would underwrite because that's how they gave you your underwriting fee and pre-bought your equity before they sold it to retail after their hedge fund friends got in and you got screwed and they got paid. And we said we're not going to do any of that. We were going to build things that were super valuable and de facto get paid. I've been telling people for decades now we essentially get paid after we create value for you on your terms according to your institution. We did this with clandestine services, special forces, Maven, every institution in government, every ally in the world, some of which love to admit they work with us, many of which don't admit they work with us. We then went into commercial, everyone said we had no commercial product. We grew commercial at a rate no one's ever seen before.

Well, again, it's very much linked to this. Everybody is still, you build these organizations, commercial, military, institutional, clandestine services. You can't really, they're not built to change. At best, they're built to adapt. Our organization is maximally adaptive on the back of a couple of principles and has maximal range of motion and they are built for right now. Meaning people want value and now people who are trying to understand where the value is work with broad categories, large language models versus software versus hardware versus the client, whether it is the US military now doing, in my view, it is all of our jobs to protect the war fighter even if you don't agree with any other part of the government or this administration. Once the war fighter is putting their life in danger it's our responsibility in my view to support them, especially business leaders who are doing very, very well in this country. But at the end of the day, and then the other thing by the way is one of the biggest critiques of Palantir still is, but what is it? Is it software, hardware? I mean, read the somewhat inane, often I don't even think they're, I think at this point they're probably just hired help when they're writing these crazy short things about us. But the legitimate thing is we don't fit into any of these categories. But that's why we're valuable. That's why the client, all of our clients need to move from categories that make no sense for them to the category that does make sense to them, which I'm the best in the world. Whether it's the US CENTCOM or whether it's commercial clients and by the way, it's the same thing internally like we're just trying to slot people into a position where we can get the most value for themselves and then therefore from Palantir.

Well, no, the thing is they of course they need broad categories and the broad category they of course but again in the beginning the broad category that they had of us is we weren't a software company because we were a services company. By the way, one of the most important indicators in the market is everybody wants to be us. Every two days. Well, four deployed engineers is now being used. Everyone like you're going to see all the research labs are all everybody's going to have like a Palantir because it's the only way to create money for the customer which is the only way to get paid. Everything else is too amorphous, not quantifiable. And you're going to be competing at the end of the day with somebody who's going to buy Palantir and how the hell are you going to explain to them that your hype trinket is going to create value when it doesn't? Especially where the delta of value creation on timelines, margins and pure alpha is so large. But to your point, no, we were never ever viewed ourselves as like we are X plus minus one, right? We are a super generous unique way of doing things which does include actual human labor augmenting the labor now with AI, encoding it, both the knowledge of your institution meaning the data but also more importantly your assumptions around the data especially assumptions that are impossible to capture like basically your tribal knowledge and melding that into something that is unique. And part of the reason people don't want to understand is you know this famous thing, you stand where you sit. It's very hard to acknowledge these things because this is a radically have-not world and a lot of people including the software thing if you can't plausibly create value rapidly you're going to disappear. And by the way, it's like white collar workers, certain weak software companies, it's like steak dinners and a widget that's not going to survive. It doesn't matter you could do weird financial machinations, none of it is going to work. And if you're just doing pure LLM, that's very hard to make that work in enterprise. You see this again without going into all the Pentagon drama it's like yeah but you know it's like that's nice and we're replacing you.

No, the world has figured out. I don't know. It's very hard. I think it's super hard for people. Look, no one's figured out this world completely. And we have never seen anything like this. We have like technology has in the modern world has been very aligned with the society itself. But this technology is not purely aligned with the society the way it is. You have like people who've historically had the best jobs in the world, the most protected, most respected, most interesting. But those jobs are going to disappear and very rapidly. And those people are not used to having like the way vocational laborers are treated, right? So it's like that's going to be, we have on the military front all of a sudden America's doing things that you know like two, three years ago a lot of people are looking at America's like well we could definitely do that especially if we even spend half the money, right? No one thinks that now and it's like on every front. So this is a, we're in uncharted territory and the best thing that can happen to you is you, and again this is where people could learn from retail. You first of all you have to be on the front line yourself. You cannot outsource what you're doing to an expert unless that expert then conversely the definition of an expert nowadays has to be you were right and therefore I think you might be right tomorrow. Not you have some weird degree or something or someone says you're an expert. And then you really have to investigate these things yourself and you have to be open to yeah things are changing so rapidly that yeah what existed yesterday is not going to exist tomorrow.

Well, everybody who's watching this should just reflect no matter where you are on war or this administration or anything else. This country has an ability to define itself, meaning our constitutional order and the spirit around it and our economic success because it is defended by courageous men and women who are willing to put their life on the line. And by the way life on the line, they also have many, most have like children at home, spouses at home. Like these are people taking on enormous risks that have a lot to lose. And at Palantir, we're, you know, as has been reported, on the front line of a lot of these things. And we obviously believe once the proverbial bullets start flying, we have one side. We're on that side. We're going to support it all the way through, beginning, during, and after. We're not particularly attenuated to popularity or polls. The war fighter is fighting for us, and we are going to fight for them.

Well, I mean, we provide the layer that makes these models valuable and it orchestrates where and how they're used and a lot of things that can't be discussed in public. But look, I'm very focused, we will do whatever is best for the war fighter. That's the priority, maximum priority for us. I think we're doing pretty well as a company and you know people, it's going to be a very exciting ride.

Well, what about our rule of 127?