Reed’s view
I could say artificial intelligence is overhyped and businesses that have tried implementing it are finding it useless. I could also say AI is already transforming industries in profound ways. Both statements would be correct.
For a good illustration of why, look at Palantir, which had its annual AI conference on Thursday.
I was first introduced to the company in 2012, while covering white-collar crime at The Wall Street Journal. Palantir was working with federal prosecutors and the SEC to catch insider traders by finding unusual patterns in trading data that humans missed.
Nobody was calling it AI then, but it still seemed like magic. In reality, it was the result of painstaking work. Palantir had to send its “forward deployed engineers” in for each client to customize and tweak its software in what is often a trial-and-error saga that doesn’t always work.
When a breakthrough happened in large language models, it didn’t mean Palantir could simply throw out the software it had spent a couple of decades building. It meant it had a new tool that could, under the right circumstances, expand the capabilities of existing products.
If you believed tech company CEOs and AI doomers — that the technology had reached an inflection point and would soon surpass human intelligence — you might have thought Palantir was about to become irrelevant.
Instead, the opposite has happened. Palantir was well-positioned to quickly adopt large language models because it had already built a lot of the existing infrastructure or had the muscles to do it.
Companies that never would have hired Palantir thought they could shortcut the work and just use a glorified chatbot to get the same result.
“Silicon Valley totally effed up,” said Palantir CEO Alex Karp, speaking at the event, “in overhyping LLMs” and promising artificial intelligence was right around the corner.
But Karp isn’t exactly underhyping the technology, either.
“An LLM is a raw material that has to be processed, and the processing of the LLM will change America and change the world,” he said.
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Room for Disagreement
While Palantir has capitalized on the phased approach to improving AI, many tech leaders have also suggested world-altering AGI is right around the corner. Earlier this year, Sam Altman wrote in a blog post, “systems that start to point to AGI are coming into view.”
Notable
- Palantir’s “forward deployed engineering” model has been widely adopted in recent years, especially among AI startup founders who have closed huge venture capital deals by embedding with customers and fixing their problems on-site, Business Insider reported.
- The company’s sky-high valuation of $363 billion, up more than five times from a year ago, has also raised some eyebrows, with famed short-seller Andrew Left betting against the firm. He likes the company and the leadership, he told Fox Business, but the pricing is “absurd.”