AI Warfare: Palantir CEO's Call for Weaponization

0:00One area that has been really controversial for AI in general is the concept of integrating more AI into military. Some people call for it and some people, you know, think it shouldn't be done. I, for one, think the military and healthcare are two areas that are incredibly critical to look at. I think there's a lot of benefits to integrating AI. The benefits are very obvious. But that being said, I think it's something that we definitely need to be very thoughtful about for a number of reasons. You know, I have a lot of concerns, for example, with inflection AI that, you know, prioritizes an ecosystem's life over the life of a human.

0:36integrating something like that into the military or healthcare, I think could be very dangerous and could literally cost lives. And so I think it's very important that we take a very good hard look at that. So today on the podcast, I'm going to be talking about Palantir's CEO. Palantir is a defense company that has been getting quite heavy into AI lately and talking about what their CEO has been saying. So I think if we want to back up a little bit on this story, of course, back when after OpenAI's GPT-4 launched and started kind of showing how powerful it was, you had a whole bunch of really big tech people, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and a bunch of other people sign an open letter, you know, asking in, I think this was in March, asking for like a pause on advanced AI development.

1:19They said anything more powerful than GPT-4 should be paused. Now, a lot of people criticize this, right, because Elon Musk then went on to start XAI. And there, A lot of people said, well, you just want to be paused because you're behind and you want to be able to get into the ring and catch up to them, essentially. So there was that criticism. Some people said, yeah, this is necessary. In any case, no sort of overwhelming pause ever happened. However, it did kind of lead OpenAI to say, hey, we're not even developing GPT-5 right now. When in reality, I think they're just improving GPT-4 to a level that you could argue that GPT-4.5 is what GPT-5 was going to be.

2:01if they weren't allowed to develop it. They're just making the one they have a little bit better incrementally. So anyways, that's a whole other thing. But in any case, contrary to all of these kind of apprehensions that a lot of these people have had about AI and where it's going, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, he says that, you know, the boons of AI, you know, especially for military applications, should outweigh these fears. Now, on the one hand, right, I've already said I'm apprehensive about this, but on the other hand, I get where he's coming from in a sense that if you know we all say hey let's stop let's not like integrate AI into the military that's not going to stop our adversaries from integrating AI into their militaries and perhaps getting a competitive advantage so in my opinion if there's a competitive advantage to be had regardless of the fact that perhaps it's dangerous I think we need to we're like inevitably it's not a choice of like it becomes less of a choice of ethics and more of a choice of if someone else has a greater technology, we essentially have to adopt it in order to stay relevant and to protect ourselves, even if we don't plan on using it, even if it's for a defense thing.

3:03It's the same argument with nuclear bombs, right? It's like, if Russia and China and every other superpower had a ton of nuclear bombs, and we said, they're too dangerous, let's not develop them. Well, we would have no defense, right? And so at the end of the day, I think you have to be, you definitely, it's a life or death matter to be, you know, as a deterrent, if nothing else, to have a lot of, to have the most highly advanced technology possible in your military. So in any case, Karp recently, you know, stirred a little controversy. He did a New York Times op-ed, and he detailed his stance on the indispensability of advancing AI developments, and he really emphasized the urgency of integrating, you know, the transformative technology within the nation's electric grids, defense, and intelligence networks.

3:48Those are the three areas he kind of focused on, and he said this, quote, our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies from there with critical military national security applications they will proceed and then he kind of you know likened the ongoing debate to the oppenheimer moment and he was drawing parallels between the development of ai and nuclear devices right so what i was bringing up earlier amid this whole kind of ongoing controversy several industry giants have kind of sought to slow down AI-related concerns. And seven leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, and Amazon, have pledged voluntary commitments to the Biden administration to create safer AI tools.

4:32Yet, some people like Meta's chief AI scientist, Yen Lacan, Bill Gates, and Marc Andresen, also have CARP's sentiments, essentially, on the importance of really rolling forth AI and making sure we're integrating this. Specifically, Lacan from Meta, he's quite outspoken. He's on Twitter a lot or X, and he has kind of dismissed the notion that unrestrained AI development could imperil humanity as he says this is preposterously ridiculous. And then meanwhile, Gates and Andresen, you know, really fervently argue for the continuation of AI development. Of course, Bill Gates stands to gain a lot as Microsoft is a heavy investor in this area, perhaps one of the biggest.

5:19And Andresen obviously has backed a lot of companies in the space as a venture capital investor. So there's a recent interesting quote by Gates this month. He said, cybercriminals won't stop making new tools, nor will people who want to use AI to design nuclear weapons and bioterror attacks. The efforts to stop them needs to continue at the same pace. Andresen, who is an investor in various AI startups, noted that the most substantial AI related risk currently is China's potential global AI dominance. He said that's the biggest AI risk we have is if China actually became the, you know, the dominant player in this space.

5:56And that's why we really need to focus on development and moving the needle to avoid that from, you know, becoming the situation we find ourselves in. So So Karp, of course, from Palantir has a really vested interest in AI's military incorporation. As he noted in his op-ed, Palantir's platforms are leveraged for target selection, mission planning, and satellite reconnaissance. So obviously he's going to say we need to integrate it from the perspective of being the CEO of a company that has a lot to gain from that. But this push for AI has really reflected positively on Palantir's stock performance recently, right?

6:31We've seen some massive gains for Palantir, and obviously that's something that's in his mind. So I will say, though, that he also recently said, quote, the depth of engagement with and demand for our new artificial intelligence platform is without precedent. He said that during their first quarter earnings report and that he released in May. And the company stock is projected to surge by around 54 percent over the next year. That's according to Dan Ives, who's the Managing Director of Equity Research at Wedbush Securities, who claims that Palantir's AI fortress remains unmatched. So as the debate for AI development continues to go on, I think a lot of industry leaders like CARP are making a compelling case for the necessity of this technology and really strengthening national security and the economy, and are demonstrating that AI's benefits could outweigh its potential risks.

7:24Not to say there aren't risks, but perhaps the benefits are more important at this time. So I think this is really interesting. And I think that from my personal perspective, whether you like AI or not, whether you like AI integrated into the military or not, I think it actually does have to happen for a national security perspective. And it's kind of hard because it's like, you know, it sounds like, oh, you know, we're just listening to this guy who's obviously shilling for his company because he obviously has, you know, millions or billions of dollars to gain from his technology getting implemented into the military.

7:56but at the same time like the case is quite compelling we can't have china be the the dominant leader in this space um if we hope to maintain national security um strengths and so and i you know i i know this is not just an american audience listening to this so any country around the world is going to inevitably have to be thinking about that and if you are an ally of the united states militarily in your country you know perhaps you are in nato or you share weapon systems, like you are going to want to root for America to get involved in this AI technology as well, because as we're seeing what's happening with Russia and other countries, you need to have a very strong military stance at this moment in time, I feel like, to really be able to hold your ground.

8:38And, you know, you would never want your geopolitical adversaries to have a massive military advantage over you because they have advanced AI that can help them, you know, be a lot more efficient on the battlefield that you decided was unethical or, you know, just not, you know, not good for whatever reason you have that debate and decided not to do it, your adversaries will not. And so at the end of the day, you just need the best technology. So I am, you know, while I am, I do think we should be very careful about AI. I do think it does need to be integrated into military. Now, do I think that we need something like inflection AI running the military?

9:15Absolutely not. That'd be a disaster, right? That'd be like putting someone at a liberal arts school in charge of running the military. I don't think that would be great. And, you know, for that matter, not a big dig at the liberal arts schools. I don't think a liberal arts school would want a military commander being in charge of their school either, right? So I think that's a pretty fair comparison to make. And I think at the end of the day, we are going to need to integrate AI into the military, but we just need to be really careful about which and make sure that it does not become corrupted with dangerous ideologies for our troops.

9:47So this will be interesting to continue following in the future.