Rising Demand for AI in Military Applications

00:00
Given that our stock of the hour is Palantir, if you could just start us off by explaining how Egg Runner competes with Palantir, especially when it comes to military contracts. You know, I think of us as not as a competitor, but. Somewhere where we can go where they can’t. And we do find out. Tactical edge Think of devices in disconnected environments without the internet. That’s where we live. To provide that situational awareness versus Palantir relies on connectivity and massive amounts of super compute. Okay. Thank you for just giving us that context there. So as we talk about the business of A.I. military applications, I mean, we have a sense that the demand is massive. But give us a little more context, a little more color here on what that demand looks like, particularly in 2025 when there’s a lot of uncertainty tied to geopolitics, tied to the US’s place in the world versus other countries, places in the world. And how that has changed from just, say, last year. Yeah. You know, I think there is there’s a mass of information overload as military systems have become digital and in the military is now a data organization. What Palantir does really well is help you make decisions based off all your data in aggregate. And so as the world evolves to become modernized, you have a lot more you call it a lot more data challenges and the new attack vectors, because of the the evolution of technology with the warfare, with the warfighters. So now Palantir becomes ubiquitous and probably one of the most important companies in the world of Internet analysis or national security, but also with our natural allies. I like how you put that your Palantir becomes ubiquitous. So what makes companies then competitive in this space? How do other companies carve out their own lane to make sure that they, like you said, kind of work with Palantir as opposed to competing directly against them? Yeah. So we understand what Palantir does really well. They’re amazing at integrating multiple silos of data into a single location of any data type. So when you have different systems like a CRM and an ERP system and then other other silos of data, Hunter is very good at creating one common operating picture of all of that data for an organization. What we can do is we can live on the edge or in your devices with with language models. So now we can interact with air systems that never need the Internet. So now we can optimize a warfighter on a personal level, while Palantir creates the digital twins of the organizations and helps out more of the that the tactical and but but more so the higher strategy vision if you will if that makes sense. So when it comes to what you do at X Runner, you don’t need data centers, for instance, you don’t need persistent connectivity. Does that make you an asset light business? That’s right. I like to think of us as like if is the brain or the heart like the fingertips. So becomes one of the devices and we’re at the M OS or occupation specific use case. So, for example, an army logistician requires a much different than a combat medic, which requires much of an air than a fighter pilot. We can build eyes that live in your in your machines or on your devices. And then Palantir lives at the brain or in the data center where you aggregate all of that data and then make decisions based on historical data, but also data in real time. So now you have this synergistic effect. What what needs have not yet been met in this space. Where is the whiteboard space in military applications? I’d say it’s the convergence of hardware and AI. And so, for example, these A.I. models are very big and compute intensive. They’re getting smaller and more efficient, and hardware is also getting more powerful. I’d say once we hit that convergence where computer chips are powerful enough to to to even train models on the edge and models at GBP four or even GBP five level equivalent can be small enough to live in your laptop or on your phone. That convergence is the missing piece, which is what we’re most excited about and also what we’re solving for. And of course, one thing that people are excited about when it comes to Palantir is not just all the work it does across the US government and other governments, but also its revenue that it gets from the private sector as well. What kind of open space do you see for other, I wouldn’t say competitors, but these smaller companies that kind of run alongside Palantir like an edge runner? Yeah, you know, I think I think it’s I think of them as a depiction, the picks and shovels. So as data is the new gold, Ponta is amazing at mining this data and making sense of it. Now we’re folks like Josh Hunter and other startups. We can build tools around what Palantir’s doing really well. Palantir can create the market and make data a lot more important. What we can do is now train these smaller agents with that data and make them better. So as you can understand your data better and have you have better access to it, these agents can get better and more personalized for your organization because now you have a better data strategy thanks to Pelletier and tools like it.