Opinion
Sankar: Chat is a limiting interface; prompts are meant for developers
“Chat is a massively limiting interface, you know, at the limit prompts are for developers.”
Insight
Sankar: Autonomous AI planning will fail in strict enterprise state machines
“The practicalities of an enterprise is there is either an implicit or explicit, and often it's kind of fifty-fifty or some combination, implicit-explicit state machine that represents that enterprise. So the idea that you're just going to have an agent that ki…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sankar: Enterprise AI value will accrue to application layer owners
“So I, we feel like the value is really going to accrete to folks who own the application layer and the enterprises, and we're going to go after that very hard.”
Insight
Sankar: The best LLM use cases offer massive upside and harmless failure
“The best use case is going to be ones where
When the LLM gets it right, there's massive upside.
And when it doesn't, it's a no op, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sankar: Foundation model companies will struggle to adapt to enterprise multi-model ensembles
“Yeah, I think that's probably the correct direction. And I think one that, that, that model companies will have a hard time with, right? Cause I think they need to have kind of one model to rule them all or directionally that's where it needs to go.”
Insight
Sankar: LLMs can use APIs to dynamically generate enterprise user experiences
“The whole point is not to give me answers, but you change my app. And then that starts changing how you think about interacting with these things. It becomes a new UI layer. You know, kind of the most extreme version of this is like, why have any UI at all? If…”
Insight
Sankar: Palantir's forward deployed engineer role combines product, customer success, and engineering
“The Ford deployed engineering idea was that the people who are going to be interacting with customers in the field, we're going to be computer scientists. You could actually understand what does the product do today? What does it need to do today? How is it un…”
Insight
Sankar: LLMs need external tools for specialized workflows like orbital simulation
“Like an LLM is not going to know anything about orbital simulation or weapon hearing or Predicting forward inventory, 30 days from now. It's certainly not going to do that well, but with the right tool, it's going to do that quite excellently.”
Insight
Sankar: Enterprise ontologies provide semantic compression to make LLM outputs reliable
“You can kind of think about the ontology as having this semantic layer that gives you an incredible amount of compression that you're putting into the context window and allows you to build LLM backed functions in very reliable ways.”
Disclosure
Sankar: Palantir targets domain experts, not data scientists, with its AI tools
“I think there's a fair amount of companies I see going after kind of let's call it the canonical data scientists as an archetype of like, I want to fine tune a model and I'm going to go do that. I see a smaller number trying to go after devs as an archetype, b…”
Assertion Supported
Sankar: OpenAI's GPT-4 is currently unavailable in classified government environments
“We live in a world where we can't count on GPT-IV everywhere. Like we don't have that on classified environments, right?”
Disclosure
Sankar: Healthcare now accounts for roughly a third of Palantir's business
“Healthcare is roughly a third of our business. It's certainly, I mean, it's probably one of the fastest growing parts of our business as well.”
Insight
Sankar: LLMs shift IT triage from alert severity to solution consequences
“In a world where the LLM can process all the alerts and give you a stage set of actions, now you're prioritizing not on the severity of the alert, but on the possible consequences of the solution. So that, that's already an improvement in the sort function, an…”
Assertion Supported
Palantir Foundry powered US and UK COVID vaccine distribution
“And this is the same platform that was used to build the COVID vaccine response distribution in the U S and the UK same platform that commercial companies were using to manage the supply chain crises”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Palantir operates 550 microservices released multiple times daily
“We have 550 microservices. We're releasing multiple times a day for each one of these services.”
Disclosure
Palantir used LLMs to cut a two-month UI feature to two hours
“It's like one of the consequences of a hack we had a number of months ago was that I had an engineer who could build a feature in a couple hours that we had previously scoped. It was on the roadmap. It was a feature that was going to take like two months and t…”
Shyam Sankar