Alex Karp is not happy with AI labs.
In a fiery interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday, the Palantir CEO said that he was “not throwing shade” at AI leaders like Dario Amodei. (“There’s nothing more fun than debating Dario in private,” he said.)
Then, he ripped into their companies.
“Something has gone completely wrong,” Karp said. “The basic view among enterprises in this country is ‘I’m going to chillax and waste my time with tokens, I’m going to get no value, and they’re going to get my IP,'” he said of AI labs.
Karp said that enterprise leaders have told him in private that they are concerned about AI companies getting access to their data and their “alpha,” referring to the edge that a business has in the market.
“We need to build trust,” Karp said of the AI industry.
Many of Karp’s views are reflected in Palantir’s recently posted nine-point manifesto on the importance of “AI sovereignty.” It included a reference to these worries: “Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril” and decries tokenmaxxing.
As for the loss of “alpha,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned about a similar fear earlier this month. He hoped that entire industries wouldn’t “find their knowledge commoditized right out from underneath them.”
In the interview, Karp appeared to nod to Anthropic’s dispute with the US government over the use of its models in certain military situations.
“Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley? That is effing insane,” he said.
Karp described a culture of silence around AI. He said that leaders told him things like: “I am paying for tokens that create no value.” He said the reason this is happening is “because these models have been completely, irresponsibly, oversold.”
Indeed, there has been a strong token backlash in recent weeks. While some companies were previously tokenmaxxing — spending as much as possible on AI — many have recently begun to rein in spending and scrutinize efficiencies more closely.
“You sound pretty angry,” Becky Quick, the “Squawk Box” co-anchor, said to Karp.
The Palantir CEO pushed back: “No. This is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me.”
“I’m telling you, it is absolutely a problem for this country, because we are on the cutting edge of every single AI technology,” he said. “But if you’re going to triply oversell something — and by the way, the enterprises are just tired of it.”
He asked people to call CEOs in private and say: “Mad man Karp is on TV saying we’re livid, I’m not going to quote you.”
They would respond saying they are “twice as livid” as Karp, he said.
