For much of the past two years, big tech has dominated the artificial intelligence (AI) storyline. “Beautiful seven” members Microsoft, AmazonAnd Alphabet have invested billions in the likes of ChatGPT maker OpenAI and perhaps its biggest rival, Anthropic.
Meanwhile there is Teslathe brainchild of Elon Musk that aims to bring self-driving cars and humanoid robots to the masses. And of course, virtually none of the generative AI applications being developed by these mega-cap tech companies would even be possible without the help of Nvidia‘s graphics processing units (GPUs) and proprietary software.
If you’ve read any of my previous pieces, you know that I tend to use November 30, 2022 as my starting point for the AI revolution. To add some context, that’s the day ChatGPT was released to the public. Since then, Nvidia has easily outperformed each of its Magnificent Seven peers – with a gain of more than 700% at market close on December 12, 2024.
To put it bluntly, this is Nvidia’s world and everyone else is just living in it. However, smart investors realize that the performance of even the biggest giants can be matched. Outside of big tech, there is one company that has maintained star status in the field of AI Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR).
Palantir has proven its ability to compete with larger established players in the enterprise software world, and some investors like billionaire entrepreneur Chamath Palihapitiya claiming that the company hasn’t even started scaling up yet.
With so much potential on the horizon, is it possible that Palantir is the next Nvidia hiding in plain sight? Let’s dig in and find out.
During Palantir’s third quarter earnings call, CEO Alex Karp made an interesting statement about how data integration is the most important variable in developing AI-powered services.
Karp stated: “The experts who write about these things seem to believe that the asset, i.e. the LLM, is the valuable aspect of this and that the actual ownership, i.e. how you handle the asset, is the real value. “
What Karp is trying to say here is that large language models (LLMs) are more of a commodity than a proprietary technology. While Gemini from Alphabet, Claude from Amazon, Meta‘s Llama and ChatGPT all offer unique features, the average user can’t really tell the difference between these platforms. According to Karp, the real value proposition is the way data is entered into LLMs through supporting software integrations. And that’s where he believes Palantir has an edge.
