Efrain Torres

Alex Karp explains how to make yourself valuable when LLMs make general knowledge cheap: He starts from the premise that AI has already changed what knowledge is worth. "The thing about the commodity nature of LLM is it commodifies general knowledge." If a model can hand anyone broad, general information, that information no longer sets you apart. Karp says this matters most for one kind of person: the classically smart generalist. He uses Yale as his example, and he says he picks it because it's strong. "I like to pick on people who are strong. It's a very strong school." He still recommends the top schools: "There's a couple schools you should go to if you get into. Yale's one, Stanford's one. There's some schools you maybe should go to otherwise go to the cheapest school and come to [Palantir] or just come here." His point is that the degree alone doesn't protect you. General intelligence without specific knowledge does not hold up well: "If you are the kind of person that would have gone to Yale would have ear kind of classically high IQ um and you have generalized knowledge but it's not specific you're effed." So how do you become valuable? Karp's answer is to build deep, specific domain knowledge, the kind of practical ability that general knowledge can't stand in for. He gives concrete examples: "How do I actually bend the metal of the hull on a ship?" "How do I actually write a script that allows me to target terrorists..." "How do I put the cement in a factory with such precision that you can build a factory like it was built in Taiwan in America?" He also describes someone with only a high school diploma who can diagnose what's going wrong in a complicated device that would otherwise need a Japanese engineer to fix. Then he names the category plainly: "How do I do anything with deep specific particularly voca what's considered vocational training?" Karp says these are the people who will be rewarded: "Those people are going to make a a lot more money simply because you can turn it any way you want, but at the end of the day, within a relative rapid amount of time, you will get paid downstream of the value."