ai and ml<\/p>\n
‘Enterprises are fed up,’ says Alex Karp, because LLM makers ‘want to tokenmax’ instead of understanding enterprise needs<\/p>\n
Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn\u2019t think frontier AI labs prepping for IPOs really understand what their customers need, and that ignorance is making Palantir a success.<\/p>\n
Karp had a wide-ranging, often rambling and self-interrupting sit-down<\/a> (coherent compared to some of his other<\/a> interviews, to be fair) with CNBC\u2019s Sara Eisen on Wednesday in which he said that every single enterprise customer Palantir has is unhappy with frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Those companies, says Karp, are operating on a \u201chyper religion of hyper optimism\u201d that doesn\u2019t reflect the experiences of their customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey believe all problems present, past, and future, including the ones they create but don\u2019t acknowledge, are going to be solved by them,\u201d Karp opined. \u201cEnterprises are fed up because they know this doesn\u2019t actually work this way, and isn\u2019t working.\u201d<\/p>\n That frustration, Karp said, is driving businesses to Palantir\u2019s Foundry systems, which act as AI-agnostic data integration platforms for unifying disparate data sources and cognizing them with whatever LLMs a customer chooses to deploy. Pitch to prospects or not, Karp is on to something.<\/p>\n AI projects are largely loss makers for the companies that deploy them, and have been for some time. Only 28 percent<\/a>\u00a0of AI use cases fully meet ROI expectations, according to a recent Gartner estimate, and most fail<\/a> to ever get out of the pilot stage. Despite that, business leaders keep shoveling coal<\/a> into the AI furnace to try to extract value, which, if you ask Karp, simply isn\u2019t there unless you\u2019re pairing those models with some decent infrastructure. Infrastructure Palantir can provide, natch.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just the man and woman on the street who are unhappy with the frontier labs,\u201d Karp said, pointing to \u201cevery single enterprise we deal with\u201d being frustrated with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI\u2019s ability to provide value for their businesses. Karp said that Palantir leadership has been debating whether they should pay potential customers to go talk to frontier labs themselves before signing a contract with his outfit.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPeople come out of there screaming, saying ‘this could never work for me, they don\u2019t understand the enterprise, they don\u2019t care about my enterprise,’\u201d he said of customers. Frontier labs, Karp opined, just want customers to “tokenmax<\/a>\u201d \u2013 that is, to view token consumption as a measure of productivity and usefulness.<\/p>\n The charge isn\u2019t out of left field. Google CEO Sundar Pichai even nodded to the phenomenon<\/a> at I\/O last month. Burning more and more tokens is getting to be expensive for companies, and OpenAI is\u00a0reportedly<\/a> considering reducing its per-token charge to attract more customers in its growing war with Anthropic, which Karp called the \u201cleading frontier firm\u201d in his interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n Karp wouldn\u2019t give a straight answer when asked whether OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs could do what Palantir is doing, but he did imply some doubt. Sure, they have some good engineers on staff, he said, but that doesn\u2019t matter a lick if they \u201cdon\u2019t talk to the enterprises or understand the technical challenges\u201d their customers are facing in deploying their models.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you go to San Francisco and talk to them, their basic vibe is \u2018we don\u2019t have to solve your problem today because tomorrow you\u2019re going to go away and all your problems are going to be solved,\u2019\u201d Karp charged. \u201cIt\u2019s largely religious.\u201d<\/p>\n