Palantir's Pivot to LLMs: A Revolution in Enterprise AI

This article was edited by Andrew Salamon, head of content at Daily Palantir. You can follow him on twitter here

The Exclusive Interview: A Technical Insight

In an eye-opening recent podcast interview, Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar pulled back the curtain on the technology the company has been developing for the past 20 years. Unlike any other time, Sankar dives deep into the technical aspect, revealing the company's current strategies and its vision for the next two decades.

Palantir and Large Language Models (LLMs)

LLMs, known as Large Language Models, are revolutionizing how businesses approach data. By using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze billions of data points, they can provide accurate results within milliseconds. This offers a massive opportunity to speed up growth, efficiencies, and productivity in almost every business sector.

However, to implement an LLM, a company must have valuable proprietary data and a robust AI infrastructure. Herein lies Palantir's golden opportunity. By becoming the de facto AI infrastructure company for millions of enterprises planning to use LLMs, Palantir stands at the threshold of an enormous business opportunity.

The Importance of Ontology

During the interview, Shyam explained the significance of ontology in achieving accurate results from an LLM. By ensuring faster time to value, ontology becomes the heart of a successful large language model. The three-minute clip that Sean shared emphasized the interplay between ontology and LLMs.

In essence, ontology offers a common foundation of truth for data. Whether structured or unstructured, siloed or not, ontology brings all data into one place, providing a meaningful structure that drives value for the business.

Shyam revealed that the decision to invest in LLMs occurred around Q4 of last year. The realization that LLMs were just waiting for something like ontology to unlock their true value created a wave of excitement within Palantir.

The company had spent 20 years thinking hard about dynamic ontologies and how they are valuable to humans. Suddenly, the world of LLMs offered a new avenue to build reliable functions and discover innovative solutions to complex problems.

Shyam likened an LLM to a "stochastic Genie," referring to the random nature of its output. The challenge for engineers is to create a toolchain that takes this randomness into account. Developers need to understand how many unit tests they need for an LLM-backed function and create health checks, calibration, and telemetry to ensure reliability.

Unleashing the Potential of AI

The integration of LLMs into businesses presents a "Gold Rush" opportunity, transforming companies and making them vastly more productive. The power of ontology and Palantir's AI infrastructure positions them uniquely to capitalize on this massive trend.

However, it's not all smooth sailing. Shyam cautions that an LLM can also be counterproductive if not grounded in the reality of a business. A wrong output could have catastrophic impacts on the business, such as ordering incorrect inventory levels or making poor hiring decisions.

According to Bloomberg, the market opportunity for Enterprise AI could reach $4.4 trillion by 2033. This places Palantir in a prime position to become a key player in the AI space. The combination of ontology tooling and infrastructure that Palantir offers could revolutionize how businesses operate.

Palantir's pivot towards Large Language Models, grounded by ontology, is a fascinating revelation. The interview with Shyam Sankar illuminates a future where the confluence of market opportunity, timing, and technology could give rise to revolutionary products and services.

With this strategic direction, Palantir is not only looking forward but also providing a glimpse into the potential transformation of business as we know it. The blend of ontology and AI could well be the key to unlocking productivity and success in the business world of tomorrow. Only time will tell how this ambitious vision materializes, but one thing is clear: Palantir is staking its claim in the promising future of Enterprise AI.

Thanks for reading the article. If you'd like to get in contact, please @ me on twitter here or email me at amit@dailypalantir.com. You can join our Palantir Facebook group here to participate in community discussions, polls, and more. You can check out daily palantir audio content here.