I’ll be honest. I often have no idea what Palantir CEO Alex Karp is talking about.
On conference calls and elsewhere, the highly compensated, frazzle-haired executive can veer from victory laps on the company’s performance, to claims out of left field of Western civilization’s superiority, to bizarre revenge fantasies aimed at short sellers, and on and on and on.
Until recently, one of the things that I rolled my eyes at was Karp’s relentless insertion of terms best left in the philosophy grad student lounge – dialectic, determinative, ontology – into what coudl have been straightforward discussions of sales and profit and expectations.
(Side note: All journalists are contractually obligated to note that Karp received a Ph.D. in philosophy in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt.)
Except somewhere along the line, that last word – ontology, “a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being,” if that helps – became Ontology, a key component of a product that’s central to Palantir’s rapidly growing business selling its software package to corporations.
As Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar saeid on the company’s most recent conference call, when asked what the company’s competitive advantage is in selling AI software: “Our advantage comes down to Ontology. it’s really an advantage on the AI demand side. And that has positioned AIP to be the platform that is able to capture the ever-expanding capability of the raw LLMs and turn that into business value.”
That sounds pretty vital. But it’s still kind of difficult to understand what,exactly,Ontology is. The company itself is only vaguely helpful, explaining that “the Ontology serves as a digital twin of the institution, containing both the semantic elements (objects, properties, links) and kinetic elements (actions, functions, dynamic security) needed to enable use cases of all types.”
A new note out from Mizuho analyst Gregg Moskowitz, who covers the stock, attempts to explain it a bit, writing, essentially, that it’s a tool in “which fragmented data can be unified and transformed into operational knowledge.”
Goldman analysts who published a note back in March on Palantir’s tech stack did somewhat better. Thay call Ontology the “core technical differentiation” that “bridges the gap between the raw data across an organization (structured, unstructured, siloed, etc.) and operational decision-making.” Goldman’s analysts elaborated:
“Consider a global manufacturer: in a traditional data approach, it would have separate databases/tables for its suppliers, shipments, warehouses, and products.
However, these are just rows and columns linked by foreign keys (i.e. a column in one table that references the primary key i