I think we're living through two big global changes.
One is geopolitical and the other is technology. The
interesting thing is they're happening at once. So you've
got the world moving to a much more, well
, let's call it the moment of American unipolarity is
over. There are now adversaries, particularly China,
that are near peer or even potentially stronger than the
US in certain ways. So that's a fundamental geopolitical
shift. But at the same time you're seeing a
revolution in artificial intelligence, technology which will change every
aspect of our lives, not least defense and military
. And I think that will play out over a
very short period of time. This could happen in
5 to 10 years, and it's of the scale
of the industrial revolution, but will play out over
a much shorter period of time. How does the
AI component play into Palantir? It's central clearly to
what you do, how, how does generative AI
and large language models, how are you building them
into your products, particularly when it comes to automated
defense software and solutions. So we, we provide
the software layer in which you deploy the models.
So the LLMs are held, if you like,
in harnesses by our software so that they can be
used in secure, auditable and transparent ways, and
that means you can get the maximum value from them
. The best way of thinking about an LLM is
like a unit of cognition. So all of the
workflows, all of the daily tasks that involve some
element of human cognition, those are what you might
be able to replace over time with LLMs. Now
of course you need to do that in a way
that is very secure, that's very transparent, that's
very auditable, but that's what we're embarking upon now
. So our software is being deployed by a number
of allies in the West broadly defined to do precisely
this. And what you're seeing is an exponential improvement
in their productivity and in the efficiency of what they've
traditionally done. So that's here and now. What
does that look like then in 5 years' time,
given how rapidly AI is innovating. And if scaling
continues as we expect, what does defense software look
like in 5 years? How agentic will it be
, and how do you keep humans in the loop
? So I think the question of how you keep
humans in the loop is going to be a policy
question. Technologically, unfortunately, I think we're moving
in a direction where much of the process can be
automated. So lots of this could be done by
agents, and so the big question that we're all
going to have to confront is where do you insist
on having a human in the loop? And I
think in the West we're very clear about the importance
of maintaining that. My concern is that adversaries may
not be. What specifically Does Palantirr put in place
? To ensure that there aren't disastrous errors in the
deployment of this software, what mitigating factors are built
in? Well, you can think of our software
as the mitigating factor, so we are the harness
in which you run the model so that you can
do that transparently, securely and auditably, and the
audit is the key thing. It means you can
know and you can go back in time to check
when a decision was taken, what did the decision
maker know at that moment in time. What was
the context in which they made the decision and so
forth, and in the end that's the safeguard.
There's a human in the loop taking the decision,
but the software captures everything that the human knew at
the time. And so for example, if it's
a question of collateral damage, was that something that
was available as information to the decision maker at the
moment when they took that step? You've worked very
closely, of course, Palantir in Ukraine for a
number of years since that conflict. What has Palantir
learned? What has your team learned by operating,
working with the Ukrainians, particularly when it comes to
the pace of digital transformation on the battlefield? Ukraine
has been the R&D lab for AI in a military
context for the last 3 years. It is the
absolute bleeding edge of military technology. There is no
substitute for. A real battlefield. You can build
things in the laboratory, you can test them,
but you don't know whether they really work until you've
seen it on the battlefield, and Ukraine sadly is
where that is currently happening. I would pay enormous
credit to the Ukrainians here. They have been phenomenally
innovative. They are ingenious in many ways. Part
of that is circumstance that they have not had all
of the equipment and resources that they would have liked
, and so they've been forced to innovate. But
that has led to an extraordinary acceleration in military technology
where you're seeing. Major leaps every 6 to 8
weeks where tactics and procedures have to change because of
some fundamental technological discovery or progress. I think the
only historic analogy that I'm aware of is the development
of radar during the Second World War, where every
bombing raid back and forth across the Channel led to
some fundamental discovery in radar. You're seeing something similar
occur today in artificial intelligence in Ukraine. You've signed
pretty significant contracts with the AOD here in the UK
. You're investing here in the UK. How does
that position Palantir to grow and lock in future contracts
of that size and scale, not just in the
UK but on the continent? The UK is,
we believe, the country outside of the US and
China that has the the the the the best quality
and quantity of the kind of engineering talent that you
need to build software like ours. So the UK
can be an epicenter of defense, military, technology
development. It has all of the, all of
those ingredients. So that's why we're very keen to
make a significant investment here. We want to tap
that talent, in effect. We already have 1000
people in London, and that is our second largest
office globally, but we want to grow that significantly
over the next five years. And the UK is
the premier military power in Europe. It's a key
pillar of NATO. I think it has the potential
to be a key bridge into the rest of the
continent, but also act as that security guarantor for
many other countries.