Palantir Technologies, the Silicon Valley analytics firm best known for its surveillance software is turning a new page in its journey. Just as the mass exodus of companies to the cloud triggered the need for cloud transformation platforms, companies clamouring to integrate AI systems will ask for the equivalent of this in the AI space. Palantir promises to fill this gap with their newly launched AIP or Artificial Intelligence Platform which they claim will “empower companies to use LLMs safely and securely.” 

What does Palantir’s AIP do?

The platform is focused on enterprise security – it builds a wall between the company’s private network and private data and what the LLM can or cannot see. Alok Panigrahy, the Head of Channel GTM at Palantir posted a demo of the AIP on LinkedIn saying, “With top-notch guardrails, the AIP ensures regulated and trustworthy AI deployment, enabling adherence to legal and regulatory standards while making LLMs operational in your own network and simplifying the life of operational users.”

And Palantir does have a very important point to make here. As quickly as companies are pivoting to AI and integrating LLMs, there will be obvious cracks in the wall. The architecture that these LLMs will run on simply aren’t prepared enough yet. LLMs like ChatGPT are already known to scrape data from companies inviting a myriad of security risks. In a world like this, nothing will potentially be safe anymore – companies trade secrets, financial data, client information. 

In an interview with CNBC, company chief Alex Karp outlined the risks that organisations adopting LLMs may eventually face. “It’s going to really crush a lot of businesses for two reasons – because if you run an LLM or an algorithm on an architecture that is crumbly or crispy, it won’t work. It will also crush architectures because there will be an inability to create a barrier between the LLM and the decisions that involve ethics and are classified. Our business is built to do that,” he explained. 

“But as LLMs become specialised in every business, their real value will be at the intersection between your business logic, your business norms and ethics and the LLMs. The people who get all three right will make money. 

Building stronger infrastructure

If the rest of the world wasn’t prepared yet, Palantir was. In a blog posted on April 7th by company chief Alex Karp announcing AIP, he explained how Palantir is perfectly placed to fill this need. “Our software and company were built for this moment. The advent of more generalizable artificial intelligence systems has begun to materially transform and advance the business we founded nearly two decades ago.

The deployment of artificial intelligence in these novel contexts will only be made possible by foundational data platforms that enable the imposition of the legal and ethical constraints, as well as the implementation of regulatory requirements, that now govern the use of data across industries and national boundaries. And we have spent two decades building those platforms,” he stated. 

While Palantir’s rebranding as an ethically aligned entity may be surprising given its history of morally dubious ‘spy-tech,’ it may be the right business move. Last month, the company published a couple of noteworthy articles on AI ethics and why they must move forward beyond being merely performative. 

There’s a bunch of other partnerships that Palantir has entered into to cushion themselves infrastructure-wise. On 5th April, the company announced it was expanding its partnership with Microsoft Azure to its public sector. All of this was to build Palantir’s integration capabilities for its government and commercial customers on Azure. 

A few days ago, it also stated that it was doubling down on its investment in deploying software to edge devices while also announcing Palantir Apollo, the company’s solution for edge deployment. 

Finally profitable

Whatever direction it is going in, seems to be the right one. This year, the Peter Thiel-founded firm posted its first ever profitable quarter, three years since it went public. Karp stated during the earnings call that the company was on track to make more money this year and it certainly seems that way. 

Funnily, as most Big Tech companies abandon AI in hopes to beat the other, Palantir has become the one company that has turned ethics into its moat. 

In the last blog written by Courtney Bowman, the company’s Global Director of Privacy and Civil Liberties Engineering, the company warned investors against gobbling up the AI hype without any heed. “From self-driving vehicles to radiology and predicting job success based on candidate video snippets, there is a growing disillusionment with AI snake oil, alongside an increasing need to discover the credible bedrock underneath the sands of an AI hype cycle. In practice, this means examining what works, discarding what doesn’t, and recentering our moral frameworks around the contexts and whole-of-domain challenges of operationalized AI and away from vain musings about paper clips and trollies,” she said. 

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