SPINMANTV.ME

Even Alex Karp Is Sick Of The Hype

So Alex Karp went on CNBC a little while back and basically had a meltdown about AI, and I mean that as a compliment. The Wall Street Journal picked it up too, “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI,” and the headline alone tells you everything. This isn’t some rando on LinkedIn with a hot take. This is the CEO of Palantir, a company that has built its entire empire on AI, standing in front of cameras saying the quiet part out loud. Companies are paying a fortune for tokens and getting basically nothing back for it, while the labs walk away with all the data and all the leverage.

And look, I’m not here to defend Karp’s politics or his business model or any of that. That’s not the point. The point is he said something true, and he said it loud enough that people had to pay attention. He called it a wealth tax, businesses handing over their IP and their decision-making patterns just to rent some intelligence by the token, and honestly that’s about as clean a way to describe what’s happening as I’ve heard.

Because here’s the thing I keep running into, over and over, with founders and operators and even friends who run real companies. Everybody bought a seat at the AI table because they felt like they had to. Board asked about it. Investors asked about it. Some competitor put out a press release and everybody panicked. And so companies went out and bought the big flashy LLM subscription, plugged it into a workflow nobody really thought through, and called it transformation. Meanwhile the actual value, the stuff that would move the needle, never got touched.

That’s the gap nobody wants to talk about. There’s a real difference between AI that does something and AI that just performs doing something. A chatbot that answers customer emails in a slightly more polished tone isn’t transformation, it’s decoration. A model that can summarise a meeting you already had isn’t insight, it’s a party trick. Companies are buying the shiny object and calling it strategy, and then they wonder why revenue didn’t move and why the team didn’t get faster and why the customer experience feels exactly the same as it did eighteen months ago, just with worse grammar in the emails now.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it because it’s the whole reason I run things the way I do. AI can send the message. It can’t build the relationship. AI can summarise the data. It can’t tell you which relationship in that data actually matters and why. And most of the AI tools flooding the market right now are optimised for the first thing and completely useless at the second, because the second thing requires actual judgement, actual context, actual history with a person or a market or a problem. You can’t token your way into that.

So where’s the real value then, because I’m not an AI hater, I use the stuff every day. The real value is underneath the surface, in the boring unglamorous places nobody’s building demos for. It’s in the workflow that used to take four people three days and now takes one person an afternoon, freeing that person up to go do something only a human can do, like sit across the table from a client and actually read the room. It’s in the research grunt work that used to eat your whole morning, so you can spend the afternoon on the phone call that actually closes something. AI’s job is to clear the runway. It was never supposed to be the plane.

And so when I hear Karp basically saying the emperor’s got no clothes, I don’t hear a guy trying to sell more Palantir contracts, even though sure, that’s part of it too, that’s fine, everybody’s got an angle. I hear a guy validating something a lot of us have felt for a while now and were maybe a little afraid to say plainly. A lot of this stuff is hype. A lot of companies bought the hype instead of digging into what their business actually needed. And the businesses that figure out the difference between decoration and value, they’re the ones that are going to be standing there in three years while everyone else is still trying to justify last year’s token bill to their board.

At the end of the day this isn’t really an AI story. It’s the same story it’s always been. Tools don’t build businesses, people do, and the companies that remember that are going to run circles around the ones chasing the shiny object.