Alex Karp’s Most Controversial Speech Yet

Philosophy is downstream of tech and culture

00:00What have we learned about AI in business that's relevant? And what I what I what am I pretty certain is going to affect our culture? In in philosophy, which I was once going to be my métier, and I realized should not be for lots of reasons, including most importantly, I thought it was more important to actually do things. But it it One of the things people forget about philosophy is the core concepts are actually downstream from things that were built in the world. Modern architecture led to modern philosophy. Postmodern architecture led to postmodern philosophy. And there's a weird way in which I think a lot of the trends that look inscrutable to us are actually downstream of tech and culture

Why America leads AI

00:39and are particularly pronounced in this culture, which is the only culture that really really matters in AI. It's from chips and what we call ontology to large language models to the town, to the venture backing, to the understanding of how to organize the town. They're in one country. And this our country. And this does not make sense because the it wouldn't could have made sense in other trends, but actually the mathematical basis of large language models started in in in Germany. It was Leibniz's idea of how to do probability and then moved through France. And the best mathematicians in the world are mostly in France and in Russia. And so, what was it and what is it about what's happening that is affecting things that

01:23look very odd? Why do Ivy League trained humanities highly privileged people vote against their interest, seemingly, to elect political figures with no experience and who clearly Why are they misaligned with their own interests? Would be a question. And then, why is it in America? And I want to just start with the most obvious obvious point that is so obvious we we forget that the rights we have in this country are inalienable and they're given to us by God. As you compare this to, say, the German constitution, which I wrote down the same as where we talk about endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, the German the German version, which is translated roughly as a conscience conscience of his

God-given rights vs. European constitutions

02:12responsibility before God, so not from God, and mankind, inspired by the will of an equal member it to be part of this is rough translation, United Europe and to contribute to world peace. Okay. So, we have these rights that are incorporated in our first and second and in our fourth amendment that aren't given to us by humans, they're given to us by a higher power. That's very very important in understanding. When you look at businesses as an example, some businesses that look that are 5 years appear to be 20 years old. Some businesses, you know, we have Rupert Murdoch here who seems to be getting younger every year. Every year. I've known you for a long time. Why is that? The principle And then we have

02:55this So, you have this revelation. It's happening in a country which, at least constitutionally, obviously not historically, is much much older than Europe. Is Europe United Europe is only it's under 30 years old and it's still not clear what it is really. You have a country which should not have been the leader of what matters in the world, but is the leader in the world. And then we have a very big moral problem in the basis of most humanity human rights, historically, philosophically, legally, except for in America, have been based on our basically superior cognitive capacities. And, you know, as Huntington once famously said, we believe in the West that our values are superior. The non-West understands it's our it's our

03:38ability to organize violence, which is an an intellectual and technological endeavor. And that's the thing that has made us, at the end of the day, be able to be superior over non-human life forms. With large language models and AI, you actually have the first time where we How do we justify our obvious superiority, not just as a culture, but as a species, vis-à-vis something that may be able to do cognitive things that we can't do? And we are the lone country that has the basis for this. Our rights are not given to us by our intellectual superiority. They're not given to us by consensus built in Germany or in the United Kingdom. They're not built to dedicate to world peace, although that would be nice. They're given to us by

The moral problem of human superiority

04:21our right that we were born here as Americans and those rights are indelible. This is a very big distinction and it's one that we neglect and do not talk about and for lots of reasons many in the Valley may not be interested in talking about. And then there's And then what Why are these so important? First of all, so obviously we have our rights vis-à-vis the machine. And and I think And then you also have What does it mean to be in a world where you have very high-end labor being exceedingly valuable? Formerly high-end labor, meaning you studied humanities and you would be working in a 501c3 dedicated United Nations, not being objectively valuable. I don't mean morally. Most of us here would look

AI inverts the value of labor

05:04askance at that as being misaligned with what they're saying. But even if you don't view it that way, the reality is a large language model can do all that work. And if it's an ontology, we can do it much much better. So, it's objectively not valuable. What is valuable is working class vocationally trained people with specific knowledge. And here I would see it I see a tethering between the specificity of America, that we have a constitution given to us by God, that we believe in higher principles, that we defend them if we need to with our own guns, with our own free speech, and with our own rights of privacy, and the specific things that create value in the world now, meaning specific knowledge of how

05:47to build something, how to target something, how to protect data, how to be a nurse or a doctor. These skills can be very leveraged and excruciatingly important. So, you have a constitutional and moral tethering of exactly what you would need in one specific culture, and that's this culture. But you're going to have a lot of turbulence because we're now moving from people who believe they deserve empathy. This is one I think the biggest tensions. One of the very radical things about Palantir that our enemies do not believe. We at Palantir have maximal empathy for Americans, for the right of Americans to be free, and for men men and women that actually do work. And our society, if you look at any professions, what you'll see, we

Empathy for working-class America

06:31read the laws so somehow the law will not allow us to protect Americans who are being murdered by fentanyl. But more than more Americans have died of fentanyl than have died in any war since World War If those were Stanford grads or Cornell grads, you can bet your last dollar their erudite jurisdictions would read the laws so that you could stop that. But they're not. They're working class. They're mostly male. They're mostly white. And mostly people don't care. And we have to change that. When things go wrong because those people know that no one cares about them, that's also our fault. Like not anyone in this room, but like we don't show empathy. If you look at If you look at, for example, the way

07:12analysts were neutrally do models, they love the people they like. It shows up downstream in the model. That's why Palantir was undervalued. We were undervalued and misunderstood because we were doing radical crazy stuff they didn't like. If you look all across the world and what you're seeing go on in America now is an enormous shift towards we have to actually look at where the value is created and have empathy with people who really deserve it. And those people have not gotten enough empathy and technology is about to change that. And it's going to change everything politically because it is actually real. The worker, the person on the front, the people that write the scripts that protect us. All those projects you saw

07:52are being done by people with vocational training in the military. They're creating enormous value and they deserve the respect that they're going to ask for and they're going to get. And Palantir and all of us are Palantir are behind that. And that And I this just And And then conversely, how do you get a situation in this city where you just vote for someone who has no experience in doing what they're going to do? None. Even Like I grew up I view myself as classically progressive. I care You know what classically progressive is? The government has to work. You know what that means? You need the very best people. Who are the people? They have experience running complicated organizations. They have ideas on how to

Voting for competence, not inexperience

08:33run software. They understand the complexity of the law. They enforce it. If you're really serious about making the things work for the worker, those are the people you vote for. Those are the people that need to be in charge. And that's that's why a lot of these crazy things are actually very much explicable based on what is going on in AI and who's creating the value and how they create it. Then, last maybe not least on the AI front, one of the reasons we are in a kind of a doomer AI circle is because you can only explain the promise of AI if you understand and embrace the superiority of America and its culture. Because there are dangers in AI, but the reality is there's only two cultures that are going to win in

America or China will win AI

09:15the next year. It's going to be us or China. The Europe, I spend half my life in Europe. At this point, we when we talk about Europe, we do exactly the same thing as when we hear about educational programs in led by mayors or safety programs in the inner city. We just say that I really hope it works out. Please. And I want Europe to win. But we're on our own. Of course there are dangers in AI. And AI is also and will never be anything other than a dual-use technology. But we must must embrace our ability to build it, our ability to own the chips, to own the software, build the large language models, and run very very quickly. Because, again, to quote Huntington again, if we are not the ones controlling the violence, we will not be

No one is coming to defend you

10:01dictating the rule of law. The things we hold precious in this culture, I would say embodied by our Constitution and especially in our first four amendments, those things will not be the same if we are not the dominant technological culture in the world. And while we may have tons of disagreements on these things, we must be the those are really the alternatives. And most of what we can do, in my view, to counter our adversaries is also to build the technology and then one of the lessons of Palantir is no one's coming to defend you. You have to defend yourself. And we used to live in a world where you could rely on experts to articulate our vision. But who should have to articulate our vision in this last

Meritocracy as a revolutionary tool

10:43election in my hometown, formerly hometown? Like we if we're waiting for people to articulate and fight for us, we are cooked. And you know, the people who disagree with us are like often better organized and better motive and more motivated. And that's a huge problem we have to solve. Palantirians, half of the reason we succeeded is we were just motivated and very organized and very meritocratic. Meritocracy is the most underestimated powerful revolutionary tool that exists in any enterprise ever. And that means, you know, Shyam is a great example. Shyam was not everyone's cup of tea. He advanced because he really two reasons. He advanced because I thought he was going to be an incredible human being.

11:26And second, and I'll leave you with this, because I saw him interacting with his brother and I was like, if he could love Palantir half as much as he loves his brother, we are going to have the most important enterprise in the world. And like, the capacity to identify and advance people on a meritocratic base that have capacity to care is the single most revolutionary tool. And my kind of thinker has been infected, meaning the progressive party of the Democrats by people who do not believe in this. And by the way, to my Democratic friends here and whoever sees this, that we must stand up. One of the most important lessons in the West is if you do not fight and in as importantly, if you accept the logic that you can never vote

Fighting radicals and open borders

12:11for somebody because of they have some sub belief structure you disagree with, you are empowering the radicals in your own party and they will control everything. Whether it's immigration in Germany, which functionally controlled by people that still believe in chain migration, because you can never do a coalition with the right, or whether it's the Democratic Party that is functionally being torn apart by people who believe in anti-progressive, anti-meritocratic values as embodied by not having a border. No progressive ever has believed in an open border. None, never, has never existed because that undermines the value of workers and their labor. And if you want to see what happens to a culture when you don't

12:51fight, look at there's who's standing up in my former party to say this is ridiculous. Who stood up in Germany to talk about migration? We cannot allow ourselves to become Europe. We really have to fight. And I'm I'm sure many of the here are going to be involved in that. And Palantir, I think has been at the forefront of this and I'm most proud of the fact that we've been able to shift the culture to being in Silicon Valley away from being skeptical of America to being pro-America. The idea that you would give tools to give Americans an unfair advantage in the on the battlefield was viewed as heretical until recently. Now it's viewed as common sense. The idea that we have we enforced meritocracy when we were getting sued by

Palantir's cultural shift in Silicon Valley

13:34the DOJ for just basically just hiring the most qualified people. And if you do that and you succeed, you can actually change the way people think. And thank you.