It's worth considering that palantir, while big and spooky from a startup perspective, are a new kid on a block with some even spookier bruisers. Palantirs co

It's worth considering that palantir, while big and spooky from a startup perspective, are a new kid on a block with some even spookier bruisers. Palantirs competitors are folks like IBM, Lockheed Martin, and BAE. We know a little about thier technology and what spooky stuff it can be used for because they had to publicly market it, because they have been trying to break into markets. These other guys have comparable products. They have big data and network analysis tools. And more - IBM have some natural language analysis tech and curated data others can't touch for instance, and warehouses full of phds driving it. But they also have better contacts, shady revolving door sales arrangements with budget holders, and moats of unintegratable software already installed. Would you bet your well paid post retirement consultancy job on the continued survival of Palantir or Lockheed? I remember when the cooperation between hb garry and palantir on a tech demo came out in the aftermath of the anonymous hacks. They were scraping Facebook. If Lockheed were doing a demo like that, it would have a million dollar budget paid by darpa and use some secret bulk intercept database from our nightmares, and the demo would be to a high level audience at a military base, not at a tech conference. I don't like palantir, or the kind of things they are doing, but I like to remember they are a shrill little kid and the real scary stuff is behind the curtain. Imagine the most impressive deepmind demo done on a dataset of every email the nsa holds.