AI stocks gained in premarket trading. BigBear.ai rallied 16%; Palantir jumped 6%; Tempus AI rose 5%; C3.ai rose 2%.

Palantir stock was building on its gains in Friday’s session, up 6% on the day and 344% on the year.

Palantir shares had been polarizing before this year’s big ascent, and voices on both sides of the opinion divide have made themselves heard recently.

Daniel Ives of Wedbush, who’s the biggest bull among Wall Street analysts with his $75 target price, recently predicted “unprecedented demand as more enterprises realize the value of [Palantir’s] entire product suite with more AI use cases.”

Meanwhile, multiple analysts have downgraded Palantir’s stock in 2024, citing valuation concerns.

Palantir Chief Executive Alex Karp doesn’t have much patience for those who say the stock is overvalued. “That’s exactly what they said at [$6],” he told MarketWatch on Thursday.

Palantir’s stock closed at a low of $6 in December 2022 and is now trading north of $76, up more than 1,100% from that bottom.

Karp rattled off other times people were wrong about the stock.

“They said we wouldn’t be profitable, they said we wouldn’t be able to IPO, then they said it was only a flash in the pan because we couldn’t be cash-flow positive. They said our profitability was a flash,” he said. Palantir has been profitable on a GAAP basis dating back to the December quarter of 2022.

Karp doesn’t think the stock is controversial and says that people who understand the company’s AI technology are going to watch what Palantir is doing. He is looking to the future, where he sees a transformation of the enterprise space and a vital role for the company. “Palantir’s approach to AI is singularly valuable,” he said.

The company makes software for governments and businesses. Speaking at a corporate event Thursday, Karp said Palantir’s AI will help companies realize the “core essential meaning of your business.”

That’s “massively transformative,” in his view, “except for the people who don’t do it.”