Alex Karp's Newest Letter on AI
+ Palantir shown off at AWS's Re:Invent Conference
Welcome back to another week of DailyPalantir! I hope everyone had a great weekend - we have a lot to dive into, let’s get into it.
Palantir highlighted at AWS Re:Invent
Amazon hosts an annual conference called Re:Invent every year — I found a module where they showcased how Palantir was being used in collaboration with Panasonic Energy of North America underneath the umbrella of AWS for Manufacturing. Palantir announced a formal partnership with AWS Manufacturing back in June. Here’s the link to the module — it was 30 minutes, so for those that don’t have the time, here’s a summary:
Collaboration with AWS and Palantir: The session highlighted how Panasonic Energy North America (PENA) collaborated with AWS and Palantir to address challenges in scaling smart manufacturing use cases across multiple sites. The focus was on leveraging AI, ML, and the industrial data fabric framework to enhance smart manufacturing strategies.
Palantir's Role in Industrial Data Fabric: Palantir was integral in helping PENA implement the industrial data fabric, a framework that connects data sources to analytics and machine learning services. This framework was key to scaling PENA's smart manufacturing use cases.
Use Case Implementations: PENA shared specific use cases where Palantir's solutions were instrumental. For instance, an AI-powered inline process to reduce waste in battery production and a generative AI use case for maintenance assistance. These implementations demonstrated significant improvements in efficiency and decision-making.
Data Utilization and Efficiency: Palantir's platform played a crucial role in helping PENA harness and contextualize a massive amount of data (over a petabyte per day) for real-time decision-making. This was crucial in addressing challenges like low data availability and siloed systems.
Future Vision and Expansion: Looking ahead, PENA plans to extend the smart manufacturing capabilities developed in Nevada to other facilities, including a new site in Kansas. Palantir's technologies are expected to be central to this expansion, demonstrating their effectiveness in scaling use cases and enhancing ROI.
The overall goal of the presentation was to emphasize the synergy between AWS, Palantir, and PENA in advancing smart manufacturing capabilities, particularly in scaling solutions, enhancing data utilization, and improving operational efficiency.
What does this mean for investors?
Well, we know that the bull case for Palantir is their ability to adapt to a variety of verticals that can eventually scale — Manufacturing is a huge vertical.
Palantir’s partnership with Panasonic has been incredibly interesting — especially because of their focus on building “smart factories.” I believe every manufacturing hub will essentially have smart factories in a decade — data driven insights to guide efficiencies within the manufacturing process, ultimately working together with supply chains to drive results.
This is a space Palantir can capture because of their vast experience in optimizing supply chains. We know this specific Panasonic factory is also building batteries for Tesla (in Sparks, Nevada) so it’s nice to see Palantir play a role for a very important factory making sure the future of EV’s are intact — if anything, I believe Palantir will be able to leverage their experience here in winning future contracts for manufactures building out factories specifically for optimizing EV batteries, either Palantir can win more contracts with Panasonic (like the upcoming Kansas factory contract in 2025) or leverage this to further expand as the world shifts to EVs.
Palantir Employee On The “True Solution”
The above tweet was written by Chad, a forward deployed architect at Palantir — and I thought it had some very important insights.
Chad is describing how the big data landscape has played out since 2014. He argues that if the goal of Business Intelligence tools ultimately is to make decisions that drive growth for the enterprise, than general lake house’s (storing the data in a centralized space to drive some insights) simply isn’t enough.
He argues that most companies have not actually been solving problems, but rather just getting the data together in a lakehouse without actually leveraging that data to drive operational outcomes.
Why does this matter for AIP?
Palantir’s ontology is what drives data, logic, and actions for a business in a way that can truly produce business results — being the operating system for an enterprise.
With LLMs, there needs to be, as Chad writes, “the structure of a decision centric framework,” grounding the LLM in some form of reality so that it can accentuate the results of a user query to drive productivity and efficiency within the enterprise.
As more enterprises wake up to the necessity of having a REAL way to manage, synthesize, and make decisions from their data — Palantir’s ontology and AIP should be in the running for winning many more commercial contracts as competitors ultimately will fail to actually accomplish business objectives for C-Suites looking for real results.
Alex Karp’s latest letter
Palantir participated in the 9th AI Insights forum over the weekend — here is a link to Alex Karp’s full 5 page written statement.
For those that want the summary of his remarks:
Importance of AI in National Security: Karp emphasizes the transformative potential of AI in improving national security and defense. He highlights the need for responsible development and governance of AI to ensure its benefits outweigh inherent risks. The U.S. must lead in AI to prevent adversaries from dominating this field and threatening national security.
Approach to AI Development: The approach to AI in national security should be proactive, not reactive. Karp argues for utilizing AI to enhance the readiness and effectiveness of the Armed Forces, stressing the importance of first-mover advantage in this technology.
General Principles for Responsible AI: Karp outlines principles for ethical AI development, including prioritizing humanity, requiring robust digital infrastructure for operational AI, and emphasizing sector-specific regulations due to the unique challenges and contexts of different industries.
AI Opportunities and Recommendations for National Security: He underscores the strategic advantage of AI and AI-enabled software in defense, such as enhancing decision-making, interoperability, and supply-chain resilience. Karp recommends increased investment in AI development for defense and suggests practical steps for integrating AI into military operations.
Call to Action and Collaboration: Karp urges tech leaders to collaborate with the government, emphasizing the need for a united approach among government, industry, civil society, and academia. He stresses that AI development should align with American values and advance ethical and responsible practices.
Overall, Karp is calling on more money to be spent specifically on AI within the government and why the US cannot fall behind on AI leadership given the geopolitical landscape we are in with our adversaries not showing any signs of slowing down — his message has not changed over the past year on this subject, but it does seem that he is getting more attention from government officials who are curious on how to effectively regulate AI.
Let’s not forget…
Palantir has one board member on the National AI Advisory Committee, announced one month ago — meaning the 10 people that will help guide AI regulation and enforcement has someone from Palantir on that committee.
The National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC) consists of experts with a broad and interdisciplinary range of AI-relevant experience from across the private sector, academia, non-profits, and civil society.
Having someone on that committee is important because as the government consults where and how they should spend on AI — Palantir can at least explain why the need to spend on AI is important, which systems actually will deliver results, and then how procuring safe and effective AI systems (like AIP’s focus on data governance and security) will create a competitive advantage for the US to operationalize AI throughout the government and military.
That’s it for today - I appreciate you all deeply for reading. See you tomorrow!
Awesome update 👍