• Alex Karp touted Palantir’s blockbuster profits during a triumphant investor call.

• He said AI models are commodities: it’s what you do on them that matters.

• Meanwhile, other executives at the company deflected attention from his eccentricities, he said.

Palantir’s stock jumped more than 23% Tuesday following a blockbuster earnings call where CEO Alex Karp said the company had “absolutely gutted” the quarter.

Karpe attributed Palantir performs better than expected to a “US-led AI revolution,” but said the company wanted fewer customers.

Karp, a well-known wellness enthusiast, recognized that Palantir’s success was increasingly overshadowing his own well-known eccentricities.

Here are four key takeaways from Karp’s call with investors on Monday:

1. Other Palantir executives helped distract Karp.

Karp acknowledged he could be considered eccentric but credited other company executives — namely Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar and Palantir USG President Akash Jain — for helping other companies see Palantir as an ally.

Initially, Palantir was seen as making “too much” and making “all this money,” Karp said.

But opening up parts of its product and allowing other defense technology startups and larger companies to securely access government data has changed industry perceptions, he said.

Rather than dismissing him as “crazy,” Karp said, other companies are more willing to collaborate.

“They don’t hate the player. They play with us,” he said. Karp said having Sankar and Jain on board was key to this transition.

2. AI models are commodities: it’s what you do on them that matters.

Karp said some in the industry don’t understand the real value of emerging AI technology.

Karp compared large language models, or LLMs, to raw materials, saying the valuable asset is “how you manage the raw material.”

Ryan Taylor, chief revenue officer, echoed this point, saying that while much of the investment in the AI ​​sector has focused on improving LLMs, Palantir is focused on leveraging an AI that capitalizes “on the rich context within the company”.

To this end, Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform allows businesses to create their own AI applications. For example, Taylor said that at a large insurance company, the platform reduced underwriting response times from two weeks to three hours by creating 78 AI insurance agents.

3. Palantir wants fewer customers.

Palantir executives were surprised by the company’s quarterly results.

“Even we are shocked by the 44% growth in the United States on a $2 billion base,” Karp said.

But looking ahead, he said the company would prefer fewer customers to focus more on product development.

Karp said he would rather cultivate a smaller number of “individual titans who dominate their industry or the battlefield” rather than 10,000 customers who hate you but can’t get rid of your product.

4. Palantir wants to give American fighters “the unfair advantage they deserve.”

Karp and other leaders discussed today’s war-torn global landscape — with what he called “brutal, heinous, immoral and often terrorist enemies.”

Palantir can help significantly reduce forces on the battlefield, Karp said.

Sankar said that from Ukraine to the Middle East, the company is “investing aggressively to expand the perimeter to give our fighters the unfair advantage they deserve.”

Sankar specifically called Maven Projectwhich trains AI to analyze drone footage to identify people and objects and was adopted by the US military last quarter.

Maven can dramatically reduce the number of people involved in a target-and-shoot operation from 2,000 to 20, he said.

“There are world events happening today that would be very different without our ability to manage these things in our infrastructure,” Karp said. “And that obviously generates a lot of enthusiasm internally which trickles down to our bottom line.”

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