Palantir 首席执行官亚历克斯·卡普周一再次警告称,AI 前沿实验室对企业而言过于不可信。
这位以研究哲学闻名、并获得社会理论博士学位的 CEO,在 Palantir 的季度股东信中暗示,正是这类资本家催生了马克思主义社会主义。
“我们的业务带有马克思主义的表层和深层色彩,”他在致股东的信中谈到 Palantir 出色的季度业绩时写道。“其他公司,包括许多构建大语言模型的公司,有意或无意地意图夺取其所谓合作伙伴的生产资料。”
需要说明的是,AI 实验室并没有把 Palantir 挤出市场。恰恰相反。AI 应用的迅猛增长帮助 Palantir 取得了创纪录的业绩。第二季度,公司报告营收 19 亿美元,同比增长 93%,利润 11 亿美元,“单季度利润超过了去年同期全年的总营收,”他写道。
在与华尔街分析师的季度电话会议上,他进一步阐释了自己的类比,大量使用了国防科技公司中常见的“科技兄弟爱国者”式行话。(Palantir 的高层领导全部为男性。)
他在电话会议上问道,如果企业要“买进这样一个未来”——你的工作帮助你的“对手获胜,而所有获胜者都是一小撮住在弹丸之地的人,他们莫名相信,因为自己吃蔬菜、不支持作战人员,就理应拥有这个国家的全部生产资料?而我们其他人只能袖手旁观,承受这场革命的代价,而这代价正由我们买单。”
相比之下,Palantir 为政府和企业提供与模型无关的 AI 和分析软件,并允许组织掌控自己的数据以及 AI“尾气”,即提示词、编排和上下文。
“我们怎么为它买单?在企业语境下,人们签约购买的是模型 token 的自我愉悦……其真实成本与其他形式的自我愉悦相当,”他说。“你付钱,换来的是他们把你的知识产权、你的专有技术、你的专业能力迁移到他们的模型里,这样他们就能建立一个不再需要你的业务、不再需要你的员工的竞争性生意。而他们为什么要这么做?实际上,他们认为自己是在出于道德理由行事。他们比你优越。他们理应殖民你的企业。”
抛开刺耳的语言不谈,他提出的核心观点正在其他地方被越来越多地重复,包括微软 CEO 萨蒂亚·纳德拉等人也在表达类似看法。
这一理论指向了一份长长的公司名单——这些公司选择与 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 合作或付费,而与此同时,这些 AI 实验室也推出了从设计工具到医疗运营、法律、甚至药物发现等一系列类似业务。
事实是,这些公司中没有谁是经济意义上的恶人或英雄——就像其他营利性公司一样。AI 发展如此迅猛,市场变化如此之快,显然容得下所有人,Palantir 的业绩也证明了这一点。
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Monday once again warned that AI frontier labs are too untrustworthy for enterprises.
The CEO, who famously studied philosophy and earned a PhD in social theory, implied in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder letter that these were the kinds of capitalists who gave rise to Marxist socialism.
“There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders about Palantir’s outstanding quarter he wrote. “Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.”
To be clear, AI labs have hardly cornered Palantir out of the market. Quite the opposite. The skyrocketing use of AI helped Palantir achieve record-breaking results. For its second quarter, the company reported $1.9 billion in revenue, up 93% over the year-ago quarter, and $1.1 billion in profit, “more profit in a single quarter than we did in total revenue in the same period the year before,” he wrote.
During the quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts, he explained his analogy further, relying heavily on a sort of “tech bro patriot” jargon common among defense tech companies. (Palantir’s senior leadership is entirely male.)
He asked on the call, if companies are going “to buy into a future” where your job helps your “adversaries win, and everybody who does win is a small, tiny group of people living in a tiny place that somehow believe because they eat vegetables and they don’t support war fighters that they deserve to have the total means of production of this country? And the rest of us should just sit by it back and absorb the cost of that revolution, which we’re paying for.”
Palantir, in contrast, serves model-agnostic AI and analysis software to governments and enterprises, and allows organizations to control their data as well as their AI “exhaust,” aka, their prompts, orchestration, context.
“How are we paying for it? In the enterprise context, people sign up for token self pleasurings… at real cost like other forms of self pleasure,” he said. “You are paying for the right for them to migrate your IP, your know-how, your expertise to their model, so that they can build a competitive business that doesn’t require your business or people. And why are they doing it? It’s actually being done for what they believe are moral reasons. They are superior to you. They deserve to colonize your enterprise.”
Jarring language aside, he is making an underlying point that is increasingly being repeated elsewhere, including from the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
This theory points to the significant list of companies that partnered or paid for Anthropic and OpenAI while the AI labs launched similar businesses ranging from design tools to, healthcare operations, legal, even drug discovery.
The truth is, none of these companies are economic villains or heroes — anymore than other for-profit companies are. AI is growing so quickly, the market changing so rapidly, there is clearly room for all, Palantir’s results show.