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It\u2019s a chilly March morning in the undisclosed mid-Atlantic hotel hosting Palantir\u2019s developer conference. The defense contractors, military officers, and corporate executives in attendance are unprepared for the weather; they\u2019d assumed the previous day\u2019s mid-70s temperatures would hold. A cold rain turns to steady snowfall, and Palantir passes out heavy blankets. As people move between open-air pavilions, it looks like they were pulled from shipwrecks. Nonetheless, spirits are high. To this self-selecting crowd, Palantir is delivering on its promises. The company\u2019s stock price is soaring. The gathering is infused with the giddy groupthink of a multilevel marketing event.<\/p>\n
After securing an invite to the conference\u2014a task made challenging by Palantir\u2019s disapproval of WIRED\u2019s recent coverage\u2014I was eager to get an inside glimpse of the mysterious company. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and his then obscure former Stanford classmate Alex Karp, the company has become part of the Pentagon\u2019s AI-based combat transformation. In the past few years, though, its biggest growth has been in the commercial sector. \u201cThe commercial business is growing at 120 percent year over year. We\u2019re very proud of the 60 percent growth in government, but they're not even on the same glide slope,\u201d says Palantir\u2019s CTO, Shyam Sankar, who is also part of a four-person contingent of tech execs serving as lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve.<\/p>\n
Generative AI has helped fuel Palantir\u2019s rise, supercharging the hands-on support the company provides to its customers. Early in its evolution, Palantir would embed \u201cforward deployed engineers\u201d into companies, helping them weave Palantir\u2019s software into their operations. Large language models allowed Palantir to build products with more power, and now the engineers concentrate on helping customers build their own tools with Palantir\u2019s technology. \u201cEvery time those models got better it seemed like they were tailor-made exactly for us,\u201d says Ted Mabrey, an early employee who now heads the commercial business. Sankar elaborates: \u201cOur whole thesis has been that we\u2019re building Iron Man suits for cognition,\u201d he says. \u201cWe were rate-limited by the number of people, the creativity of the questions, all those sorts of things. And then [with Gen AI] that rate limiter was eliminated, and that changed the rate of growth.\u201d<\/p>\n
The morning\u2019s keynotes include a US Navy vice admiral, the officer in charge of the Maven AI battlefield project, and executives from Accenture, GE Aerospace, SAP, and the Freedom Mortgage Corporation. The range reflects the company\u2019s trajectory from defense work to the commercial sector. During the breakfast hour I watch a demo from a family-run fashion business with 450 employees. CEO Jordan Edwards of Mixology Clothing says that he found Palantir through an Instagram ad, and that the AI-powered system has transformed his business. He uses Palantir\u2019s software to help make buying decisions and then has it send emails to negotiate prices. For one line he sells, \u201cit drove a 17-point margin swing\u2014from losing $9 a unit to gaining $9 a unit,\u201d he claims. Edwards now describes himself as a \u201cforward deployed CEO.\u201d<\/p>\n