Everyone hates frontier AI labs, says Palantir boss

'Enterprises are fed up,' says Alex Karp, because LLM makers 'want to tokenmax' instead of understanding enterprise needs Brandon Vigliarolo Brandon Vigliarolo Published thu // UTC Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn’t think frontier AI labs prepping for IPOs really understand what their customers need, and that ignorance is making Palantir a success. Karp had a wide-ranging, often rambling and self-interrupting sit-down (coherent compared to some of his other interviews, to be fair) with CNBC’s Sara Eisen on Wednesday in which he said that every single enterprise customer Palantir has is unhappy with frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Pitch to prospects or not, Karp is on to something. AI projects are largely loss makers for the companies that deploy them, and have been for some time. Only 28 percent of AI use cases fully meet ROI expectations, according to a recent Gartner estimate, and most fail to ever get out of the pilot stage. Despite that, business leaders keep shoveling coal into the AI furnace to try to extract value, which, if you ask Karp, simply isn’t there unless you’re pairing those models with some decent infrastructure. Infrastructure Palantir can provide, natch.  “It’s not just the man and woman on the street who are unhappy with the frontier labs,” Karp said, pointing to “every single enterprise we deal with” being frustrated with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI’s ability to provide value for their businesses. Karp said that Palantir leadership has been debating whether they should pay potential customers to go talk to frontier labs themselves before signing a contract with his outfit.  “People come out of there screaming, saying 'this could never work for me, they don’t understand the enterprise, they don’t care about my enterprise,'” he said of customers. Frontier labs, Karp opined, just want customers to "tokenmax” – that is, to view token consumption as a measure of productivity and usefulness. The charge isn’t out of left field. Google CEO Sundar Pichai even nodded to the phenomenon at I/O last month. Burning more and more tokens is getting to be expensive for companies, and OpenAI is reportedly considering reducing its per-token charge to attract more customers in its growing war with Anthropic, which Karp called the “leading frontier firm” in his interview.  Karp wouldn’t give a straight answer when asked whether OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs could do what Palantir is doing, but he did imply some doubt.