Siddhartha Bansal

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Palantir's CEO just exposed Sam Altman and Dario Amodei for robbing every Fortune 500 company.

Within two minutes, Alex Karp took the entire frontier AI industry apart on national television.

His exact words:

"Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID. They are paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business."

He literally said the entire frontier AI business model is intellectual property extraction dressed up as a subscription.

Then he also destroyed the pricing model with a single question that Silicon Valley still refuses to answer:

"If it was so valuable, let's say I can make you $1 billion tomorrow. Wouldn't I say I'll make you $1 billion and I want 30 percent? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

That question breaks the industry.

If OpenAI and Anthropic's models truly delivered the productivity gains the labs claim, they would take equity or a share of the profit they generate. They would not sell access by the million tokens.

Token pricing is itself the CONFESSION that the product cannot produce reliable value at scale. If it did, they would price for the value. But they price for the compute because that is what they are actually selling.

Karp went even further...

He called the entire arrangement "a wealth tax that does not help the poor. It just punishes."

American businesses are transferring the alpha of their operations, meaning the workflows, the customer data, the strategy memos, the internal models that make them competitive, directly into the training pipelines of a handful of Silicon Valley labs. Once those labs retrain, the customer's own edge becomes the next enterprise product sold back to their competitors.

And the part the AI industry does not want anyone thinking about:

Every enterprise running its confidential documents, its customer conversations, and its financial models through a frontier model is potentially teaching that model HOW to replace them.

The vendor collects the token fee AND the compounding intelligence about that customer's business. That is the mechanism. And that is why Karp used the word "stealing."

He claims this is why every executive he meets is furious in private and silent in public. Nobody wants to be the CEO who called out the labs and then discovered their next competitor was built on their own leaked workflows.

The entire AI industry has been priced for perfection on one assumption:

That frontier labs produce durable, defensible value that justifies infinite compute spend.

But Karp just told us that the customers do not believe that assumption anymore. They believe they are being taxed without benefit, watched without consent, and copied without recourse.

The moment enterprises stop believing, the whole valuation stack shakes.

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

Strong attack on frontier AI labs from silicon valley insider and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

He explicitly mentions that enterprises must own the "means of production" in the video interview. I have long talked about why no large enterprise or nation that wants to be wealthy should ever outsource the critical capital goods needed for production - it would end up transferring "alpha" (all value creation) to its capital goods providers.

In a different context, this issue is already causing pain in the textile spinning industry. High tech robotic spinning machines are so expensive, it now takes over 7 years to recover the cost of machines by selling the finished product (yarn). So some of the mills are rethinking the foreign capital goods vs domestic labor spending.

Software companies that do "tokenmaxxing" also transfer all value to frontier labs.

Here is the crux of the matter: the entire business case behind the multi-trillion dollar capex by AI providers hinges on extracting all value from the rest of the economy and concentrating that in a few companies.

The rest of the economy has started to rebel, even the rest of the _silicon valley_ economy!

[Siddhartha Bansal @Siddhartha3000C]

@elonmusk Remarkable Progress....
Something that really thrills like kardashev scaling
Great 👍 @elonmusk

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The future is accelerating

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

.@elonmusk explains @grok’s mission: “Understand the Universe”

“Understanding the universe means you have to be truth-seeking.”

“Truth has to be absolutely fundamental. You can’t understand the universe if you’re delusional.”

[Siddhartha Bansal @Siddhartha3000C]

@MarsUniversityX @elonmusk Praiseworthy Action 👏👏
breaking rules to uncage real progress

[Mars University @MarsUniversityX]

Elon Musk: “Nothing any of my companies have done has been to stifle competition. In fact, we've done the opposite,

At Tesla, we have open-sourced our patents. Anyone can use our patents for free.

At SpaceX, we don't use patents. Once in a while, we'll file a patent just so some patent troll doesn't cause trouble. But we've done nothing anti-competitive.”

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

A year ago, I became our Chief Scientist. My R&D team and I have been working hard to reinvent ourselves. We have made very good progress but we still have more work to do.

With recent developments on the AI front, the task has become much more urgent.

I will have to decline all other priorities outside of this work. In particular, I cannot travel for various events. I apologise in advance🙏

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

I have often said this to our employees: the fact that software engineers get paid better than mechanical engineers or civil engineers or chemists or school teachers is not some birthright and we cannot take that for granted, and we cannot assume it will last forever.

The fact that customers pay for our products also cannot be taken for granted.

This is to remind ourselves that we can be "disrupted" - and the more we assume we won't be, the more likely we will be. Or as Andy Grove of Intel said "Only the paranoid survive".

The productivity revolution I see coming to software development (LLMs + tooling) could destroy a lot of software jobs. This is sobering but necessary to internalize.

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

Smart people should not get trapped in status competition.

Status competition sucks our energy to the point we achieve nothing of meaning or consequence.

Prestige is the enemy of progress. In business, prestige is the enemy of profit. In public life, prestige is the enemy of service.

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

My operating thesis: what we are seeing is not just a cyclical downturn and it is not just AI related. Even without the uncertainty induced by tariffs, there was trouble ahead.

The broader software industry has been quite inefficient, both in products and services. These inefficiencies have accumulated over decades of a prolonged asset bubble. Sadly, we adapted to a lot of those inefficiencies in India. Our jobs came to depend on them. The IT industry sucked in talent that may have gone into manufacturing or infrastructure (for example).

We are only in the early stages of a long reckoning. My thesis is that the last 30 years are not a good guide post to the next 30 years. We are truly at an inflection point.

We have to challenge our assumptions and do fresh thinking.

[Siddhartha Bansal @Siddhartha3000C]

@elonmusk Great 👍

[TheBetterPath @TheBetterPath_]

This video has changed my life:

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Question the blob narrative

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Interesting discussion of how mind viruses are created and amplified

[Siddhartha Bansal @Siddhartha3000C]

@elonmusk Right Tune

[Bill Gates @BillGates]

I’m excited to see @khanacademy and @codeorg partner to offer an exceptional 5-hour introductory course on AI taught by @OpenAI’s @MiraMurati.

[Bill Gates @BillGates]

The second episode of my new podcast is out now! Join me as I get unconfused about how artificial intelligence will transform education: https://t.co/odfojH18yG

[Bill Gates @BillGates]

When you’re learning about something, it’s important to let yourself be confused: https://t.co/XK3LYZ9pCI

[Bill Gates @BillGates]

I agree strongly with this. https://t.co/T7XyFrv89V