An excerpt from a conversation with Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, on the German podcast MD MEETS. According to Karp, Germany needs to rebuild its own tech ecosystem and create conditions for domestic competition.
It’s like the simple metaphor that works — large language models are like uranium. They have to be processed.
These things are actually economic and technical first. You have to understand what the technologies do. You have to have people who are working natively with these technologies, and those people have to be involved.
You basically have different parts of the stack. You have the GPU part of the stack — that’s chips. You have the data integration part of the stack. You can do that by hand if you want civil liberties — we do that. You have the application part of the stack — the ontology. What does it mean? How is it deployed? How is it safely deployed? How do you process it? How do you use it? And you have the large language models, both closed and open.
The closed and open models have different advantages. To have a tech scene in Europe, you need world-leading components in all those parts. That’s not realistic. So you’re going to have to figure out which components can actually advance European industry, European sovereignty. The sovereignty issue is a completely technical issue. And it’s not just Germany, honestly. What’s really happening in Europe is you have bureaucrats whose primary idea is: how do I protect the market against American companies? Everything else is downstream of that.
So if you ask me — if I’m in charge of Germany, or in charge of France, or some great nation — you have to say: “First, we have a crisis. We are going to get the best people in the world to come. We’re going to call the best people in the world.”
I’ve told this directly or indirectly to every Chancellor and every important politician I can think of for the last 10–15 years. You’ve got to do what Israel does, what China does, what America did — what we did after World War II. We built our industry on German scientists. It’s like the people who built the bomb — when we built the bomb, Einstein writes the president. The massive opportunity begins with recognizing: we have a problem that is dangerous for the present and future of our society, and it has to be solved. Only a political leader in Europe can make that statement. It would be best if that were Germany — setting aside all our emotional attachments — simply because Germany once had the best tech scene and is still the driving economic motor of Europe. There is no Europe without Germany.
Then the question becomes: you’re going to have to bring those people over, and they’re going to have to be the ones distributing the capital, hiring the people, deciding how you do this. Of course, what happens is the local people — I mean, Germany has talent, and France is the same thing, as any other country, per capita — those people learn how to do it and then build their own things. And by the way, it’s talent, not money. That’s part of the problem. Let me give you a different version: part of the reason it’s hard to do the optimistic thing is that every day, Europe makes another decision that makes it harder to fix the problem.
The full conversation, hosted by Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, is available on MD MEETS.