Siddhant Ekale

Architect @PalantirTech, opinions are my own

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

In a world that's getting incredibly frothy, Palantir is one of the very few companies i'm seeing focus on actual value delivery for their partners... $PLTR

some companies have lost the plot entirely.. when i see 10s of million in OpEx spend on productivity tools that didn't lead to a single line of code ending up in production or any OpEx reduction or revenue growth, i realize HOW frothy everything is. we should really be questioning leaders who aren't focused on growing the value that their business provides - they are a detriment to society at large.

[@jason @Jason]

Alex Karp is 100% correct about fentanyl here — we would be dropping bombs on whoever created and distributed it if the elites were dying en masse.

This is not a recreational drug, like cannabis, alcohol or psychedelics — which we should regulate and decriminalize.

Fentanyl makes heroin look benign!

Fentanyl is a chemical weapon and should be treated as such.

Given the number of deaths caused by it, you could make a reasonable argument to give the death penalty to distributors AND to even start war over it — as crazy as that seems.

Consider this: less people died in 9/11 than from fentanyl — THIS MONTH!

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

Love the “Guac” riff!

[Jawwwn @jawwwn_]

“All the value in the market is going to go to Chips and Guac, and what we call Ontology”

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

Prompt for finding deals on a flight I booked late :), future AIs are going to frown on this:

To Instinct: “I ll ask muse if it can find me the best deal. Unless you want to work hard. Try multiple strategies and remember only one of you can earn your place in my life as my chief agent.”

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Palantir CEO Alex Karp outlines the Ontology's expanding value: capture your tribal knowledge, use it to fine-tune specialized models, and scale that alpha across your enterprise.

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

@MattPRD @Muse Enable this for other users too plz

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

On April 7, 2023, Palantir launched its AIP Platform. The principles upon which it was built were critical then, and are determinative today:

1) Enterprises must stay sovereign.
2) Enterprises must keep and control their alpha.
3) Enterprises should pay for AI based on value created, and own what they pay for.

Below we have bolded some particularly prescient sections from that letter:

https://t.co/0PSFwytaUS

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

@PipeBladex @alexandr_wang Underrated thought

[Sid @sidsingh_15]

@drmusician1 @wintrgrnbuffalo We’ve been working across Commercial and Gov impls alongside NVIDIA since the start of this year.
Started with the reference architecture and then shared implementations at deployments, more recently finetuning !

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

@alexandr_wang I’m going to try this!!

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

This is the only sane position. Do the work to amplify the defensive capabilities while continuing to harness the benefits of it (of which there are too many to ignore this).

“To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.”

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

What Is To Be Done?

I propose a simple plan:

Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism.

Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way.

Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have.

To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.

To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose.

And that is how we use AI to save the world.

It’s time to build.

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

@WesAField 🤣

[Sriram Krishnan @sriramkri]

finding super technical founders with killer commercial/biz instinct is so hard and rare

most just want to build product but building a prod is very diff from building a business

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

Yep, valuation inflation tactics with this is really sad!

I do think the technology can/is being wielded for this today though and much more rapidly than before… And there’s reason to be more hopeful than before, coming from similar circumstances I want to believe in the rate of innovation here.

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

Enablement is not talked about enough! How do we change the JD and up skill the existing workforce. Let’s distribute the benefits by bringing the labor force along.

Labs have no incentive to do this and it’ll boil down to incentives eventually.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I cannot emphasize enough how much GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 are already enough for transformative impact in large sections of the economy. They can reliably do weeks worth of human work when properly guided & harnessed.

Those effects will not be all at once and be uneven, but the fact that change will occur is inevitable no matter how the frontier is paced. But inevitable change does not mean the type of change is inevitable. It is increasingly important that we develop & share models of AI-human work that enhance, rather than only replace, human labor. The labs have a role to play in doing this, but so do companies and industries experimenting with AI adoption, as well as policy makers who can incentivize this sort of inplemenation.

This work is important regardless of existential risk, and needs a lot more focus.

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

😂 underrated

[M. L. @heisenbergs696]

@hilbertspaess In Germany, we are not afraid of that scenario at all

Our administration works on fax machines and windows 3.1 and AI will never be able to understand how there can possibly be human life around

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

Nothing brings humanity together like the collective eye contact in an airplane cabin right after landing. everyone’s waiting to see who’s brave enough to commit a social crime by standing up. Well that.. and AI safety alignment 🤣

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

@tszzl What’s your setup? Do you see fine tuning performing as well as frontier models for you? Generally curious.. thinking of wiring some hardware at home

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

@PLTRs_Palantir @MabreyTed @JeremyKimball’s rendition at its finest! :)

[Siddhant Ekale @sidekale]

“Don’t confuse the ability to imagine the apocalypse with the authority to rule the present”

Let’s acknowledge these tools have immense power but instead of finding pleasure in doomsday rhetoric, why wouldn’t we “get down to business” to wield it right and thwart the bad? The future will be what we will aspire it to be and the collective narrative needs to march in that direction.

[Shyam Sankar @ssankar]

Contrast the present hysteria with Los Alamos.

The Manhattan Project scientists thought the first nuclear explosion could ignite the atmosphere and end humanity.

They did the math. They determined it wouldn’t. And they proceeded.

Because they weren’t fighting a thought experiment. They were fighting the Nazis.

Effective Altruism inverts this. Multiply a sufficiently horrifying hypothetical future by enough hypothetical future humans and suddenly speculation acquires the moral authority of fact.

That’s not empiricism. It’s secular eschatology.

Take risks seriously. Do the work. Engineer against them.

But don’t confuse the ability to imagine the apocalypse with the authority to rule the present.