Alex Karp, frontier models and the real fight for Enterprise AI
Palantir Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Alex Karp’s recent broadside against the frontier model vendors put a knife to the throat of the central enterprise artificial intelligence debate.
Karp’s argument is that frontier model vendors (he didn’t mention Anthropic and OpenAI by name) intend to suck the knowledge out of enterprises and destroy the “alpha” companies enjoy through their proprietary data, processes and underlying business advantage. In our last Breaking Analysis we called this approach “data communism,” where every firm gains access to the same intelligence.
Our counter to data communism is data capitalism, where proprietary advantage remains exclusive to an organization and its broader ecosystem. The familiar graphic below describes how we see the AI software stack evolving. The most important pieces of this stack in our view are the System of Intelligence or SoI and the System of Engagement, the new user/client surface. We believe competitive advantage accrues to firms that can make these two puzzle pieces interact and learn from the reasoning traces of humans. Critical is how they capture tacit enterprise knowledge to take governed and trusted actions both with and without humans.
