A Russian soldier patrols the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was captured by Russian forces last year. Photo: YURY KOCHETKOV/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Alex Karp doesn't think the so-called «pause» in the development of artificial intelligence, which Elon Musk and others are calling for, is a good idea.
It's not because he doesn't care about the risks of emerging technology. However, the chief executive of Palantir, the US data group, believes containment could be even more dangerous.
“If we lived in a world where the West had no opponents, where all parties were friendly and well-behaved, I would be the first to advocate for a pause and maybe try to make people not do it. We will not create this technology,” he says.
—But we do not live in this world.”
Karp agrees with the 1,800 signatories of the letter, published in March, that artificial intelligence systems with «human-competitive intelligence» could pose a serious danger to humanity. But he also believes that they give Western countries an advantage over their adversaries that will be nullified or surrendered if the developers even temporarily disable the tools.
“Generative artificial intelligence and large language models are much more difficult to create and use in authoritarian contexts,” says Karp.
“The West has a structural advantage, and we need to triple on it. We can't afford to disarm.»
Algorithmic arms race
Framing the debate in terms of a global arms race is not an empty exaggeration, as far as Karp is concerned. The Ukrainian military has been using the Palantir software to engage Russian tanks and artillery for several months now. Defense experts said the technology was instrumental in deterring vastly larger forces.
“I have been ridiculed for years for saying that the ability or inability to wage algorithmic warfare over time will be seen as the difference between having or not having nuclear power,” says Karp. «But now we see that if Russia had invested more in algorithmic technology, this war would have been very different.» Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, pictured at the company's London office. Photo: Eddie Mulholland
Palantir has just announced it will provide Ukraine with technology developed in its UK office to help investigators process a massive amount of data relating to more than 78,000 reported war crimes allegedly committed by Russian forces.
The software will be used by the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine to collate evidence in cases of premeditated murder, torture, rape and deportation, as well as destruction of civilian infrastructure and residential property.
They will form the basis of two «anchor» cases: one focused on the crime of aggression, and the other on the crime of genocide. “The problem is not to find evidence of war crimes – there is a lot of evidence,” says one Palantir employee. “The problem is understanding all of this.”
For example, investigators will be able to use open-source intelligence and satellite imagery to create a virtual map of evidence of war crimes. This can be evidence confirming the presence of Russian equipment near crime scenes, witness statements and videos uploaded to social networks by Ukrainian citizens.
“Our goal is to build a network of full and comprehensive responsibility for international crimes,” says Andriy Kostin, Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
“In order to prove these crimes, we have to analyze a huge amount of evidence… [which] would be almost impossible without modern IT solutions.”
Karp was one of the first international business executives to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after the Russian invasion last February, and the company has since opened an office in Kyiv. Palantir is also helping Ukraine resettle refugees in the UK and Lithuania.
Map of Putin's war
Sitting in front of a giant bouquet of purple tulips in Palantir's London office, Karp says dealing with the fallout from new technological data, algorithms and artificial intelligence will be easier for some countries than for others, and this «foreshadows the future supremacy of the UK and the US.»
“These large language models are based on certain revolutionary principles — they can provide reasoning at the scale of the largest datasets in the world. However, being able to interrogate the results is still pretty bad.”
He argues that improving this will be key to unlocking the potential of artificial intelligence, and will be much easier in the UK and US, which have constitutional frameworks — with strong ethical frameworks and a strong rule of law — to provide enough data protection without getting bogged down. in too much regulation.
In contrast, the EU's proposed AI regulation could make it harder for networks to «federate» and send messages to each other. Karp believes that it will therefore be more difficult to weigh, qualify and reproduce the analysis produced by algorithms.
“Currently, it is impossible to find out how LLM achieved such a result,” he says. “But you can take the result and evaluate whether it is legitimate and valuable to your enterprise. That's the value — for business and the military.
“Because that’s where all the value is, that’s where all the money will be. And you can already do it in the US and UK. That's why I think these two countries are about to experience a huge revolution. It will be much slower on the continent.”
War crimes in Ukraine
He also believes that knowledge and constitutional structures are more important than money. “This is definitely not an arms race where the party that spends the most wins de facto. The side that knows how to spend money wins. That's another reason the UK could have an edge.»
Controversial founder
Palantir was co-founded and still led by Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor who co-founded PayPal in 1998 and served as CEO company until it was sold to eBay in 2002.
Some time after the 9/11 attacks in the US, Thiel began to wonder if PayPal's anti-fraud algorithms could be used to identify terrorists. Together with a handful of software engineers, he created Palantir and began negotiating with US intelligence agencies.
The company received funding from In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Rumor has it that its software was used to search for Osama bin Laden, which Palantir refuses to confirm or deny. This early history, along with Thiel's full support for Donald Trump, meant that Palantir was often controversial.
Thiel named the company after the seeing stones from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that allowed the user to discover hidden truths and track events around the world. The visitor's pass, which is handed to me at the reception desk in Palantir's London office, is adorned with a wide-eyed caricature of a magical character and the words: «Save the Shire.»
Some critics, including privacy advocates and left-wing politicians in the US, accuse the company of being essentially a data-driven, all-seeing panopticon.
Skeptics in the corporate world suggest that the company is cultivating a slightly sinister mystique, a culture of intellectual elitism, and a very user-friendly interface for selling services and basic software that are nothing special.
The hired chief executive of Palantir said about the specific project: «I paid them a lot of money to comprehensively prove that the sun will definitely rise the next day.»
Others, however, swear by the insights Palantir can provide. Tom Enders, former boss of Airbus, has gone on record saying that hiring the company was one of the best decisions of his career.
Controversial Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel has described the UK's attachment to the NHS as akin to «Stockholm Syndrome». Photo: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg
As with the debate about the usefulness of artificial intelligence, the quality of the answers the Palantir software gives will largely depend on the questions it is asked. It was used by JP Morgan to detect fraudsters, Credit Suisse to fight money laundering, Merck to develop drugs and Airbus to solve industrial confusion.
In short, the company sends out small teams. engineers, and then deploys its platforms to bring together a wide variety of data sources, integrate, sift and cross-reference information, and generate insights in easy-to-understand formats.
The company is probably best known in the UK for its work with the NHS. The government contracted Palantir during the pandemic to track vaccines and personal protective equipment. More recently, he has done work to reduce waiting lists and combine many different systems to increase the use of operating rooms. The results of a three-month pilot program run by the Chelsea and Westminster Trust showed cinema usage increased from 73 per cent to 86 per cent.
Palantir is currently bidding for a £480m contract to build a new health service operating system . However, in an address to the Oxford Union earlier this year, Thiel said the UK's attachment to the NHS was akin to «Stockholm Syndrome» and that «the NHS is making people sick.»
Confidentiality issues remain.
Karp met Thiel at Stanford University, where they bonded over a shared disdain for law school and a love of arguing politics. Karp says they've been arguing ever since and he disagrees with his co-founder over the NHS.
«I'm a supporter of economic progress and the idea that someone in need can go to the hospital and being treated regardless of their economic status is something I strongly believe in.” he says.
“My father was a pediatrician. Throughout his career, he has served poor and disadvantaged communities. I wish we had a health care system in the US that serves the poor and needy as well as I understand the British system. I am very proud that we can support this. To be honest, it makes me feel like I'm more in line with how I grew up.»
In some ways, Palantir is like any other technology company. His office is made entirely of glass and exposed steel beams. There is a well-equipped canteen with three free meals a day and signs indicating where «legal ninjas» work. But two years ago, Palantir effectively moved its global headquarters from Paolo Alto in California to Denver in Colorado to avoid what Karp calls «Silicon Valley monoculture.»
Karp is a highly paradoxical technology entrepreneur. A lean, 55-year-old fitness fanatic with rimless glasses and a huge mop of curly, gravity-defying gray hair, he's a regular at Davos, practices tai chi every day, loves cross-country skiing, and keeps what he says is a progressive sport. Political Views.
But he has a PhD in German philosophy, not an engineering background, and he doesn't proudly apologize for the work Palantir does for the military and security forces.
Thiel asked Karp to lead Palantir because he thought he would be a good front man to explain what the company does in layman's terms. Karp isn't sure. He has described himself as a «fluorescent praying mantis» who can turn off potential customers. However, he believes that his unusual personality means that he is also well suited to support and manage Palantir's ragtag staff.
The head of Tesla and Twitter, Elon Musk, announced his support for the 'pause' in the development of artificial intelligence models for large languages. Image Credit & Copyright: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Karp has said in the past that Palantir was created to support the West. The company does not do business with countries it considers hostile to the US, such as Russia and China, an approach that definitely sets it apart from other US tech companies.
Indeed, Karp criticized Google for pulling out of Project Maven, the Pentagon's artificial intelligence program that has been compared to the modern-day Manhattan Project.
In a regulatory filing ahead of its 2020 stock market offering, Palantir said it wants to become «the default operating system for the US government.» And some of the company's government contracts have generated the most controversy, most notably helping US Immigration and Customs Enforcement identify illegal immigrants for deportation.
His work with US law enforcement has also raised concerns about racial profiling and predictive policing.
Privacy campaigners argue that Palantir's work gives too much access to individuals' personal data. The company counters that it does not monitor how its products are used, but only hosts data on behalf of customers — much like other software vendors — and creates audit trails and privacy controls to ensure that unauthorized personnel cannot obtain access to the information.
“Some companies say their technology should not be misused. This is not true, says Karp.
But it is incredibly difficult to abuse our products. That's why the secret services buy them. You can see how data moved, who touched it, and under what conditions.”
«We're not very pretty»
A former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-whistleblower claimed that Palatir helped his firm collect data from Facebook, which was then used in Donald Trump's re-election campaign. Palantir has previously said that one employee who was subsequently fired did this, and the company has a policy of not dealing with elections.
Karp says he understands why Palantir evokes strong emotional response from critics.
“We work with the intelligence community, we were founded by a Trump supporter, some people don't find us attractive. I understand that,” he says.
He notes that in Palantir's early days, it was very difficult for the company to win over the intelligence communities. “They ended up buying our product because it worked,” he says.
Why were the ghosts so reserved? “Well I come from a family whose only occupation seemed to be protesting against the defense and intelligence communities, I have a PhD in German philosophy, I am clearly center left and I don’t have a standard social life. I don't look like a typical corporate executive.
A former Cambridge Analytica employee claimed that Palantir helped collect data from Facebook that was used during Donald Trump's election campaign Photo: AP Photo/Evan Vucci“I talked about things that no one considered important, such as data protection and personal privacy. We are highly technical people who, for the most part, are not able to tell the general or the leader what they want to hear. All this is very unpleasant.”
I ask if the war in Ukraine, as well as increasingly aggressive Chinese wolf-warrior diplomacy, has weakened some of the moral convictions of Palantir's critics and made it easier for him to get his point across.
“This company was built on the idea that the West has certain unique and important virtues. These virtues must not only be defended, they must be supported by products so revolutionary some might say «dangerous» [lest] our adversaries dare to question them.»
“The broader conclusion that we have been drawing for a long time is that the world is becoming increasingly fragmented. China, Russia and America will not be able to effectively coordinate their actions simply because we have different economic or political interests.
“For a long time, this was a highly unpopular opinion. There have been many who have retained their God-given right not to invest in us and their perhaps less than God-given right to attack us.
“The part that has only recently begun to be understood is that we are building products for a fragmented and violent world where the supply chains and infrastructure that depend on and were built around globalization no longer function. «.
«As macro and product conditions become more apparent, more people are beginning, for want of a better expression, to look at things our way.»
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