Good morning,

Today’s Stratechery Interview is with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar . Sankar has worked at Palantir for 20 years, and has taken on an increasingly visible role as public intellectual, including authoring the book Mobilize , an exhortation “To Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III”. I previously interviewed Sankar in June 2023 . That interview is a great place to start in terms of understanding Palantir, which we mostly discuss in this interview in the context of AI.

To that end, in this interview we discuss why Sankar thinks the industry is insufficiently focused on AI diffusion, why companies focused on the top-line have more success adopting AI, and why he is frustrated at the labs refusal to take a systems engineering approach to AI safety. Then we discuss what Palantir has learned from AI, how companies can preserve alpha instead of the median, and whether or not we need more models.…