Opinion | Did We Make the Wrong Bet on Big A.I.?

Last week, the Palantir chief executive Alex Karp made one of his more remarkable television appearances in what is quickly becoming a notorious run of televised rants.

“Something has gone completely wrong,” he declared on CNBC, in an appearance so vivid and spastic it was widely described online as a “crash out.” He was referring to the whole structure of the A.I. industry, which had been built on top of a value proposition that looked to him like a dead end. The big labs, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, have been overhyping their own closed-source models, he argued, hoarding their value rather than empowering their clients and partners with them. More than that, he seemed to say the labs were exploiting those clients and partners — private companies and individuals but also militaries and intelligence agencies — by making use of their research and intellectual property. Open-source or open-weight alternatives, which allow considerably more in-house customization and control, were obviously preferable, he suggested, for almost all users. “The jig is up,” he announced.

Karp is an irresistibly noxious figure, a would-be philosopher king who can’t seem to sit still on a TV set or a conference stage as he holds forth about kill chains or tai chi or the woke left. Perhaps even more than Elon Musk, Karp seems to understand that in an attention-economy economy, the job of an executive is to always be pitching.

He is also perhaps the most visible spokesman of Silicon Valley’s increasingly significant defense tech sector; Anduril, Palmer Luckey’s drone manufacturer, is another of its tent poles. For the last few years, a new Silicon Valley has taken shape in a kind of cluster around defense tech, robotics and artificial intelligence, with the leaders of each sector speaking almost in unison to describe the urgency of an American industrial renaissance and present technological competition with China in terms of a new Cold War. In this view, which has been mostly embraced by the Trump administration, nothing should be allowed to get in the way of technological progress, and the march of that progress could be measured crudely in capital expenditure.

This is one reason it was so striking for Karp to be yelling that A.I. was heading in the wrong direction — a presumptive ally openly bashing the big A.I. labs and the business proposition they represent. Karp had been softly floating his critique for some time, but the CNBC event looked like a proper coming out. Just one day earlier Palantir had published a kind of manifesto devoted to what it described as the all-important principle of “A.I. sovereignty.” The central argument: Companies should seek to build their own A.I. tools, not just customize those on offer from the frontier labs. This might mean relying on open-source L.L.M.s rather than the proprietary ones on which the A.I. boom has mostly been built in America, but it would amount to a liberating declaration of independence from Big A.I., which in Karp’s estimation was sucking up much more value than it was generating.

Karp isn’t exactly a disinterested observer here. In recent weeks, out of a mix of concerns about political vulnerabilities, national sovereignty and privacy, France has announced that its intelligence service is cutting ties with Palantir. The future of the firm’s partnership with Britain’s National Health Service also seems to be in jeopardy. Karp was on TV to promote a new partnership with Nvidia that would allow Palantir to develop and sell a distinct set of products to compete with those on offer from the frontier labs — which is to say, in railing against the Big A.I. business model, he was undeniably talking his own book.

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