The Ledger, every show

“You know, the interesting thing about AI is, in the end, it's going to be limited by things like power. You know, if you're, and, you know, chips, and if you're trying to build these really massive clusters in 10 years or whatever.”

“If you're in a business where this is working for you, That's great. Don't do the FDE strategy. You have been given an amazing gift. If you have the opportunity to just scale, treat all the customers the same, go ahead and do that.”

“And I think this is where Shamsankar, who's very early employee, you know, now that I think the president and CTO of Palantir, he really invented the FDE strategy.”

“If you're not solving one of the top five priorities for the CEO, it's probably not going to work. They probably won't have the energy to persist through the much more challenging route of getting effectively a new piece of the product built in a way that work…”

“So the echo team, you know, a classic Profile for someone to join your echo team would be someone from the domain you're working in. So, you know, possibly a former army officer or someone who worked deeply in healthcare. So they have deep domain knowledge, bu…”

“What you're doing you know, in each of these new environments at each of these customer sites, Is a little bit like being a startup founder, but you're a startup founder where you have access to some very powerful piece of product leverage that makes your job …”

“Fundamentally what you're selling with the FDE model is that you're not selling the installation of software. You're selling an outcome.”

“With the FD model, you're going to get pushed towards larger and larger contracts. Like we talked about, you're going to be growing contracts per customer over time. The contracts, because they're complex are going to be more flexible.”

“What the demo does is it changes the locus of what you're thinking about from thinking about what can I build to what is it that the customer wants? And am I solving that pain point for the customer?”

“My advice to people, if they're thinking about where to join a company is I tell them to join a young company, not necessarily a small company. Right. But a young company, because a young company is still figuring things out. It's still learning. It hasn't suc…”

“This is why Palantir has birthed so many other startups is because even as a very large company, it is still a company where everybody all the time is learning, focused on learning and, you know, always doing that same grinding motion that it is to be a new st…”

“In many ways it does feel a lot like running the FDA strategy, you know, on the army. We get to see, you know, what is the, what are the CEOs? What are the leadership's top five priorities? Can we make progress against those? But also in a world where you see …”

“And one of the early robotics papers, we actually said site as open AI because we didn't want to get into a fight. You know, the first author is the one who, you know, gets cited and their name shows up every single time. So we said, you know, we're not going …”

“I think over the last year, the big frontier labs and a lot of other people have figured out the tricks to take big models. And, you know, take a very particular distribution of user input and train a model that is almost as good as the big model, but much, mu…”

“I think this is actually a real hole in the market because that's not something I can go out and purchase today.”

“I think that's the, like that we need some twist like that for AI that lets people figure out How to use the AI to solve the problem they actually have not just sort of take their existing workflow and have AI do that workflow.”

“And I think the answer is that like right now we still have to, like, this is how you learn how to do critical thinking. And, you know, I think back to Paul Graham's idea of the resistance of the medium, like even once You know, the computer can do the program…”

“And so instead of, you know, all the, you know, all the UX books that you interview your customers, you sort of find out what their problems are and you build them to solve their problems. And we couldn't do that. And so basically what we had to do was we had …”

“This is one of those things about the really great engineers, is that a really great engineer wants certainty, right? They don't want to, you know, they've been doing something for three years, they, all they can see are all the problems that are in it”

“Yeah, and at some point, there's a Joe Lonsdale neuron that, you know, is out there, you know, and individual people, you can actually find these neurons in the networks.”

“So I think that the thesis behind open AI when I joined in 2017 was that neural networks were the final architecture that could take AI all the way to human level intelligence or AGI.”

“And I remember, you know, carp always used to talk about this, that the best engineers were artists, right? And if you want to keep an engineer happy, what you actually have to do is just let him do his art, just get out of his way, let him do his thing.”

“We had already then secretly trained GPT-IV. So this was the first half of last year.”

“I think what everybody has seen so far is that Nvidia has just been able to continually do better and better and better because they have, you know, the big market and a lot of capital to throw at it. So I think it's pretty hard to bet against Nvidia.”

“A forward deployed engineer is someone typically technical and engineer who sits at the customer site and fills the gap between what the product does and what the customer needs.”

“The two key roles are those of what we call the echo team and the Delta team. The echo team were Embedded analysts. So they would go to the customer site. They would speak to the users. They would try to figure out what demo or what use case really made sense …”

“I think Aditya Ramesh, who built that model, spent 18 months, maybe two years, just getting to the first version that, that clearly worked.”

“I think it took three years before we had anyone using it to solve.”