Andrew Sullivan

web1.0 junkie

building @TeambookAI

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

"It is time for our industry to pause and take a moment to think... Otherwise, come 2020, Silicon Valley will have become an even bigger villain in the popular imagination, much like its East Coast counterpart, Wall Street." -@om

https://t.co/exLlpdBqNx

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

"When another country's official position is that your [AI] sovereignty is a problem, history says you're about to need it."

This admin's blatant weaponization of tech will do far more harm than good. It's already hurt US sales overseas and done long-term reputational damage.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

After reflection, this new narrative by Palantir is probably much more consequential than people may assume.

Palantir is basically being the canary in the coal mine announcing the death of two major assumptions propping up the US economy right now:

1) that AI labs will be able to extract significant economic rent - as opposed to AI models being mere commodities

2) that other countries can accept structural dependency on US technology and services without pushing back on sovereignty concerns

Why are Palantir specifically starting to be vocal about this?

First off, major middle-powers, even US “allies”, are one by one showing them the door. In June, France announced that the DGSI - its domestic intelligence agency, which had relied on Palantir since the 2015 Paris attacks - would replace it with French firm ChapsVision, with Prime Minister Lecornu explaining (https://t.co/SLhEGprBZC) that France “cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere” and shouldn't depend on the goodwill of companies “capable of turning off the tap.”

Germany moved even earlier: its domestic intelligence service, the BfV, also selected ChapsVision over Palantir (https://t.co/pDZVj4SYUY), and the German military has said it will no longer use Palantir at all. Then, just this week, Spain instructed state-controlled companies - including strategic firms like Telefónica, Indra and Navantia - to avoid signing any new contracts with Palantir (https://t.co/0ik4UAFrT7).

Even in the UK, Washington's most loyal vassal, the NHS's £330 million data contract with Palantir is under review following parliamentary pressure (https://t.co/uJl6g4BMsW), and London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50 million Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police.

Palantir making a lot of noise around them caring about sovereignty makes a lot of sense: it's damage control since they keep being told they're a sovereignty risk.

I doubt it will work - because it's true: they are a sovereignty risk - but the fact that they feel the need to be vocal around this tells you where the wind is blowing: they're not shaping the narrative, they're reacting to one they're losing.

What they're saying against closed-source AI (basically a broadside attack on OpenAI and Anthropic), is again highly self-serving. Palantir's sudden love of open-weight AI models conveniently coincides with them launching 2 days before a partnership with Nvidia to sell exactly that: open models models (NVIDIA's Nemotron) in sovereign environments.

So it's essentially a product launch.

It doesn't make what they're saying wrong: it is factual that the value proposition of closed-source AI labs looks increasingly unsustainable. I mean: you're paying 10X the price of Chinese open-source AI models for something that's not really better (or just marginally) and on top of that you have zero control over your data, or the models themselves.

When Palantir says that "the architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha," they're right. I'd add that this also means you shouldn't trust Palantir either with that "tribal knowledge"... they obviously left this part out 😉

When you take a step back, these two things have major implications on many other US companies.

SpaceX - which just went public at the largest IPO valuation in history - is one clear example as I describe in my latest article on the new space race with China (https://t.co/JK3ELAyEVO).

If countries like France concluded with Palantir that they couldn't depend on a company “capable of turning off the tap” when it’s merely analyzing their data, what should they conclude about a company that aims to literally control their entire connectivity - at one man's whim, from space?

What percentage of SpaceX's crazy market cap is based on the assumption that foreign governments will not do to Starlink what they're currently doing to Palantir?

And SpaceX - or Palantir - aren't alone: a significant proportion of the top US tech giants, who rose in a world where no one questioned American technological hegemony, now face an environment that's much less conducive to the kind of lock-in their business models - and valuations - depend on.

When you pair this with the fact that it increasingly looks like the US made a wrong bet with closed-source AI - an extremely expensive wrong bet - the picture that emerges is of a country that bet its economic future on two things - proprietary AI and captive allies - and is losing both at the same time.

And to compound the problem, it doesn't help that the official narrative of the US government - via the voice of Jacob Helberg, the Under-Secretary of State (https://t.co/Z1rotPl9Ee) - is to be vocally opposed to "AI Sovereignty": essentially telling everyone "you know what, your worst fears are real, our tech companies are really out to undermine your sovereignty."

Read Helberg's post (the one I linked) and put yourself in the shoes of - say - a European or Asian leader and ask yourself how you'd react to being told that building your own AI capabilities is "marching in perfect formation into the past," that your pursuit of sovereignty is really just "synchronized mediocrity," and that your only path to the future runs through American technology.

If it was me in a position of power, I'd read this as a massive wakeup call: when another country's official position is that your sovereignty is a problem, history says you're about to need it.

So yes, it looks like - unexpectedly - Palantir, of all companies, is being quite the canary in the big tech mine. Yes they obviously do this for self-serving and cynical purpose, and yes they're of course also very much part of the problem and not the solution. But it doesn't make them wrong: sometimes it takes a vulture to tell you something is dying.

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

'“The AI model the Trump administration didn’t want you to have” is advertising no money could buy.' -@gruber

Perhaps this is why ChatGPT 5.6 is pending approval from US gov: they didn't want Anthropic to have the marketing edge.

https://t.co/BeSwdP3a0V

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

💯 Building tools is more important than ever for our understanding, now that agents write most/all of the code.

But I wish harnesses were malleable/extensible enough that I wasn't starting from scratch. Give me the primitives and let me explore/understand inline.

(Maybe this an argument for pi.)

[Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt]

as an alternative to scrolling thru 36 tweets (lol), here is a blog post version of the talk i gave yesterday!

https://t.co/W61DJQ8aMx

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

Defensive corruption: give Trump 5% instead of the US public a larger % (e.g. Bernie plan).

https://t.co/8xJ6WvNSan

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

What is the psychology of an agent?

We know humans act irrationally, individually and in groups.

How will agents behave in groups? We had the stock market flash crash in 2010 and built safeguards, what other behaviors will we see?

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

Where are the auto-harnesses?

We've seen LLMs write prompts, surely they can run evals and experiment with scaffolding.

[Xiaoyin Qu @quxiaoyin]

American and European enterprises will ditch OpenAI and anthropic and adopt Chinese models. Here’s why:
1. They can host Chinese models under their own GPUs so it’s still compliant and they would argue they have more control.
2. they will post train with their own data on top of Chinese models. That’s how they build data moat.
3. They will not trust anthropic who will retain their data at any time for “safety” concerns like how they did with Fable and then try to build the same thing like how anthropic did with healthcare and legal.
4. They need to justify their AI spend and ROI.
The cure is a reliable America open source model but there is none. After all, if giving away all your data and AI control at the mercy of anthropic and OpenAI means you care about safety and compliance, you are outright stupid.

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

The US should be championing US open models, rather than encouraging the rest of world to use/depend-on Chinese models.

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

If the US gov listens to Amodei and restricts open source models, after blocking export of US models, what do you think the rest of the world will do?

Don't weaken US soft power in service of Anthropic/OpenAI's moat.

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

.@simonw Re: AI and liability, meanwhile in Argentina, the president wants to create an "AI LLC" shielding agents: "limited liability is not a luxury for such entities; it is a precondition for their existence."

https://t.co/fv5eJtWAN9

+ Yuval Noah Harari's response arguing that this is clearly a bad idea:

https://t.co/U92Hy4IRzo

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

@StewartalsopIII Your A/C works here?

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

"Only companies approved by the government will get access."

US government is telling the world in no uncertain terms: you're crazy if you have a technical dependency on OpenAI or Anthropic.

Workflow portability is more important than ever.

https://t.co/AjWq07Iq3x

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

One of the wisest voices in tech (and one of the OG bloggers) @om is gone.

To the uninitiated, I've recommended his piece on velocity many times this year: https://t.co/ePHx4pKs0F

[Andrew Sullivan @licyeus]

I'm working with Codex (GPT-5.5) on a set of bash scripts for something that's a little off-the-beaten-path. No AGENTS.md or skills for this project.

It's really struggling. I understand why some devs find LLMs underwhelming.