AI is making a lot of people rich. You might not be one of them, says Palantir CEO Alex Karp — and that’s the problem.
In an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Karp said AI will likely raise living standards broadly, but the scale of gains at the very top will be wildly disproportionate to gains elsewhere. Axel Springer is Business Insider’s parent company.
Karp said that AI wealth disparity is the “biggest problem in this country.”
“While it will raise the standard of living of the average person, the people involved are likely to get 10, 100 times wealthier than they already are,” Karp said on an episode of Döpfner’s “MD Meets” podcast that aired Monday.
In past technological revolutions, Karp said, the gap between winners and everyone else was far narrower: “The person at the bottom, maybe their salary doubled, and the person at the top became five times wealthier, but it was very unusual to be a billionaire 40 years ago.”
“You now have a revolution where, you know, I could become 20 times wealthier than I am now,” he added.
AI is creating a “complete decoupling” between ordinary economic gains and a small class of people who attain “unimaginable wealth,” he said.
‘They’re telling you your life is going to suck’
Karp said that even if AI doesn’t cause massive job losses, it doesn’t stop people from worrying about it, as some of the people behind the technology have made those cuts seem inevitable.
“The people running the lab companies, who are the leaders, told you it’s true,” Karp said. “They’re telling you your life is going to suck. And they’re also getting very wealthy, and you don’t find them very likable.”
While he didn’t name any executives, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have warned about AI causing job disruption. Recently, they have softened their positions.
Karp’s comments come as anxieties around AI are boiling over into public backlash. Gen Z has shown resentment toward the technology, while the data center boom is also being met with hostility from communities and politicians.
It’s also not the first time Karp has spoken critically of the AI industry. He ripped into the leading labs earlier this month in a CNBC interview where he said “something has gone completely wrong” with the AI market.
Karp told Döpfner that while he believed AI would make a lot of people’s lives better, he was skeptical of any framing that AI would be a “plethora of good things” that everyone would profit from.
“The overselling of AI in this country is really, really, really, somewhat disconcerting, but it’s also depressing because you don’t have to do it,” Karp said, describing AI as a “natural resource” with both positive and negative potential.
He also had some choice words about those leading the AI race.
“These are like very oddly-shaped-IQ specimens that you probably wouldn’t want to have over for dinner,” he said. “And if they were over for the dinner, you have nothing to talk to them about. And, by the way, vice versa.”
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