In the last three months of Dec. 2023, Palantir, a data management software company, which caters to military and intelligence agencies as well as global corporations, generated revenue of $608 million, up 9% from the same period last year. The company had hit another record profit in the fourth quarter, the most profitable in the company’s two-decade history.
Palantir’s stock is up 30%, signaling that investors are happy to see companies make money on AI.
In a shareholder letter, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said that the revenue bump is driven by “surging demand,” which is being seen across industries and sectors, for AI platforms, including large-language models, and are capable of being integrated with existing company’s data infrastructure.
“The demand for large language models from commercial institutions in the United States continues to be unrelenting,” he said.
Palantir is banking on generative AI as its future
Karp said that the company’s latest generative AI-driven platform, simply called “AIP” for “artificial intelligence platform,” is bringing new revenue and customers. Data integration used to take weeks and months, but the latest platform can be up and running in as little as a few hours, he boasts.
Karp said that proliferation and interest in LLMs “mean little without an effective way of allowing those systems to interact with an organization’s underlying and proprietary data.” And Palantir wants to deliver on that. Industry experts have said before that generative AI products are most useful when it’s combined with proprietary data. Karp noted in his letter that generative AI-driven products will be the future of its company. Investors seemed to agree.