Comment by joecool1029
4 days ago
So, what exactly did Palantir provide? I'm staying out of commenting whether or not this was legal/justified and asking strictly what service this was that was sold.
Is this like, live location information provided from social media/carriers/etc? Is it AI guessing who might be a target based on collected data?
EDIT: I ask because this sort of claim could just be marketing on Panantir's end and the quotes and this post never actually explained what it was other than saying their software was used.
I believe 972mag.com have reported on Palentir tech involved in the "AI target selection" programs that the Israeli military has used in Gaza. My recollection is they use a logic similar to the subprime ratings agency scandal: collate info on individuals (cell tower proximity, movement patterns, social media leanings), and find the top 5% of target candidates, call those "high quality" regardless of any absolute metric of quality, and then rubber-stamp approve air strikes on their homes by the human lawyers "in the loop" -- then repeat with the next top 5% and call those "high quality" again. The implication was that Palentir worked on the ranking system itself. (The 5% is arbitrary here, a stand-in for whatever top slice they do use)
There are a couple such systems, and I am speaking without the ability to take the time right now to find those articles to confirm/counter my recollections, so consider this a prompt for a proper review -- ironic.
This comment may be a good stepping stone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222724
The human in the loop gets a few seconds to decide if it's a target or not, do not know the exact number.
Most likely as a data lakehouse, but the Palantir angle is most likely overstated - Palantir has a tiny presence in Israel, and has had a history of overstating it's intel and defense credentials (eg. A three letter agency that churned Palantir was named for years after before they stopped calling them out).
That said, I have heard some positive feedback about Palantir's data integration capabilities - most other vendors don't provide bespoke professional services to build niche integrations for even low ACV customers.
The era of microservices and micro teams gives all "company X uses us" claims a different vibe. Maybe it used to actually mean "this is the thing Facebook uses to power its website on millions of servers" but now it's usually like "the team of 6 that runs the analytics platform for Apple Fitness+ uses this on 5 servers"
Their association with defense comes from the fact they got their start in industry thanks to in-q-tel which literally has the purpose of funding technology for the CIA and intelligence agencies. So it would not be surprising if they were heavily intertwined in that world.
> thanks to in-q-tel
IQT has invested in hundreds of rounds, and in the cases I have dealt with personally, has been very hands-off. Most other IQT funded companies I know of never showcased it to the degree that Palantir has - for example, OpenText was a peer of Palantir in the early 2000s and never showcased it's IQT ties.
Thanks for attempting to answer what I was asking about. I have had difficulty finding out more about it, the alleged ex-Palantir commenter said this would be part of their Gotham product, but most of what I could find on that was buzzword data visualization stuff. If their old post history and what you're saying is accurate, then it's really just a database integration tool with a nice interface?
“A nice interface” disguises the truth here. Palantir is so successful because they build minimum viable prototypes on the fly for clients, deliver rather than balk when custom code has to be written, and leave working solutions alone. (See also other replies about FDEs here.) It’s the kind of behavior I used to take for granted as normal as a small-town ISP, and were it not for their ‘ethics are the customer’s problem’ approach I’d have signed on as a database / dashboard engineer for them years ago.
> it's really just a database integration tool with a nice interface
In a way, though I think it understates how difficult of a problem unified data integration is - especially in organizations with disparate schemas and internal data that may often not be well documented and with dev teams that are often personnel strapped.
Most other vendors in the data integration space don't provide the same degree of support and hand-holding that Palantir does with their FDEs. The FDE model is their secret weapon tbh - it makes it easy for organizations to gain temporary staff augmentation without having to expend their hiring budget.
Having being working as a direct competitor to Palantir on and off for the past decade, I'd guess one of their embedded engineers wrote a few custom SQL queries.
Dark humor
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