5 ms·

What does Palantir do again? Serious question.

nikivi 6y ago
Build software to do data analysis + work with clients. From what I know.
CamperBob2 6y ago
Basically what it did in the LotR books and movies. Provide technology to questionably-ethical people that gives them insights into things they wouldn't ordinarily be able to discover, accompanied by longer-term downsides that aren't readily apparent at the time the technology is deployed and used.
- irq 6y ago
  This analogy really works for me. Palantir is a well-named company.
aidenn0 6y ago
Data mining for primarily government customers. Named after the seeing stones from Tolkien's mythology.
deeblering4 6y ago
Their site should have some info about that, let’s see... “At Palantir, we build software that lets organizations integrate their data, their decisions, and their operations into one platform. Our software empowers entire organizations to answer complex questions quickly by bringing the right data to the people who need it.” Whoops! Never mind, I have no idea what this is describing.
- memexy 6y ago
  It's vague on purpose. Their target demographic is CIOs and CTOs at large corporations and bureaucrats in governments. That language actually makes sense to them.
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    >That language actually makes sense to them. Maybe they think it does, but it can't actually.
    - seedless-sensat 6y ago
      It is reasonable to think a CIO may have some concrete data sources in mind that they want to integrate and build business intelligence on top of. The language is abstract since Palantir develops bespoke applications.
    - Mobius01 6y ago
      But it does. You see, these high level executives often have a goal in mind, but the best way to go about it is with this sort of ambiguity because it gives them room to inflate the expectations and plausible deniability when it goes wrong. If you look at the PowerPoint therapy know as consultant-driven product development, you will see the same language. Vague, ambiguous when documented.
- ethbro 6y ago
  It means they apply current data science tools for legacy clients who have tons of data, but few modern engineers.
  - yters 6y ago
    Part of their modus operandi is to eschew data science in favor of human in the loop pattern analysis. This is born from Thiel's experience at paypal where human in the loop was much better at catching human fraud than machine learning and other automated approaches.
    - ethbro 6y ago
      Human-in-the-loop, definitely. My point being that they still deploy a lot of low-level data science against data sets to prepare a view for human interaction. And their typical customers have limited ability to do that prep in-house.
- paxys 6y ago
  If you have to ask, you're not their target demographic. It's pretty safe to say they are not looking for potential customers stumbling upon their website and deciding to try them out.
memexy 6y ago
Software consulting similar to Accenture and SAP. They have similar customers as well, banks, corporations, governments, etc.
Barrin92 6y ago
call their developers "forward deployed engineers" which sounds cool to bureaucrats, who give them ungodly amounts of tax money to put their data into databases
tdeck 6y ago
My understanding is it's mostly just BI-style dashboards for peoples' personal information, plus marketing.
- daseiner1 6y ago
  missing the key detail that their first and (as far as i’m aware) still biggest customers are the military and law enforcement
  - bigiain 6y ago
    And Saudi government "diplomatic teams" with bone saws...
  - tdeck 6y ago
    I figured everyone already knew that, my point was just that the tech itself may not be very impressive.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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snarfy 6y ago
Bossware, but also for governments.
jazzyjackson 6y ago
"Palantir software is a Java-based platform for analyzing, integrating, and visualizing several types of data, including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. In addition to accessing all natively connected data sources, such as ... Palantir's import process allows Warfighters to easily draw in any other types of data, such as unstructured message traffic, structured identity data, link charts, spreadsheets, phone data, and documents. Palantir has a link analysis tool similar to Axis-Pro, Analyst Notebook (ANB) and the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) Standard Cloud (DSC), which are currently used in theater. The Palantir platform uses advanced database technologies, combined with a sophisticated front-end GUI that enables extraction, transformation, and linked of varied datasets. Palantir uses a revisioning database, also known as version control, to documentall modifications performed on objects and entities in the database. Users of Palantir can perform dynamic modeling scenarios in which they manually create links between unrelated objects and entities that update across all datasets in the repository without permanently changing any of the original data" Essentially a graph database that plays well with geospatial polygon and route searches along with time series', useful for trawling through all your surveillance data and putting together who-did-what to decide who to, erm, target There's a few screenshots and also pretty interesting user reviews in this Operational Assessment Report published by US Army April 2012 Actually here's my favorite user report on how they use the software, page B-6: "Look for bad guys. Find out who and what those guys are connected to." https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/08/1830_001.pdf https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/08/1830_0...
- hogFeast 6y ago
  So Neo4J (I think that has versioning?) with AirFlow? Seriously, I have never quite understood what all these unstructured data companies do. Autonomy had quite a big product...which, as far as I can tell, was largely about spending heavily on sales and trying to get companies to pay you for warehousing data (with very little of the AI wizardry they claimed to be selling). I think there a publicly listed company that also does this kind of thing...I don't get it. I understand why you can charge an unsophisticated company to hoover up all their useless data, I am not sure how much actual tech is being deployed here beyond that database. EDIT: I think I am recalling Elastic, which I think has an unstructured data business...maybe that is just my imagination.
jariel 6y ago
Palantir is just CGI or Accenture or Booz Allen or IBM, but focused on Defence, Security etc.. They have devs with 'clearance' and the 'vibe and BS' of a Silicon Valley firm. So their BS is more focused than Accenture BS. To be somewhat less cynical - almost all companies have difficulty with IT. I worked at a large handset maker that did some seriously important things, and our IT was delerious. It was as bad as a random cracker company. To do internal reporting, data warehousing, etc we were incompetent. Even companies that are able to transition their core product offers to being more 'tech' still lack operational technical capability. It's hard, and there's so much churn it's difficult to even tell 'who is good, who is not, how much it should really cost'.

Build software to do data analysis + work with clients. From what I know.

Basically what it did in the LotR books and movies. Provide technology to questionably-ethical people that gives them insights into things they wouldn't ordinarily be able to discover, accompanied by longer-term downsides that aren't readily apparent at the time the technology is deployed and used.

irq 6y ago
This analogy really works for me. Palantir is a well-named company.

aidenn0 6y ago

Data mining for primarily government customers. Named after the seeing stones from Tolkien's mythology.

deeblering4 6y ago

Their site should have some info about that, let’s see... “At Palantir, we build software that lets organizations integrate their data, their decisions, and their operations into one platform. Our software empowers entire organizations to answer complex questions quickly by bringing the right data to the people who need it.” Whoops! Never mind, I have no idea what this is describing.

memexy 6y ago
It's vague on purpose. Their target demographic is CIOs and CTOs at large corporations and bureaucrats in governments. That language actually makes sense to them.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  >That language actually makes sense to them. Maybe they think it does, but it can't actually.
  - seedless-sensat 6y ago
    It is reasonable to think a CIO may have some concrete data sources in mind that they want to integrate and build business intelligence on top of. The language is abstract since Palantir develops bespoke applications.
  - Mobius01 6y ago
    But it does. You see, these high level executives often have a goal in mind, but the best way to go about it is with this sort of ambiguity because it gives them room to inflate the expectations and plausible deniability when it goes wrong. If you look at the PowerPoint therapy know as consultant-driven product development, you will see the same language. Vague, ambiguous when documented.
ethbro 6y ago
It means they apply current data science tools for legacy clients who have tons of data, but few modern engineers.
- yters 6y ago
  Part of their modus operandi is to eschew data science in favor of human in the loop pattern analysis. This is born from Thiel's experience at paypal where human in the loop was much better at catching human fraud than machine learning and other automated approaches.
  - ethbro 6y ago
    Human-in-the-loop, definitely. My point being that they still deploy a lot of low-level data science against data sets to prepare a view for human interaction. And their typical customers have limited ability to do that prep in-house.
paxys 6y ago
If you have to ask, you're not their target demographic. It's pretty safe to say they are not looking for potential customers stumbling upon their website and deciding to try them out.

memexy 6y ago

Software consulting similar to Accenture and SAP. They have similar customers as well, banks, corporations, governments, etc.

Barrin92 6y ago

call their developers "forward deployed engineers" which sounds cool to bureaucrats, who give them ungodly amounts of tax money to put their data into databases

tdeck 6y ago

My understanding is it's mostly just BI-style dashboards for peoples' personal information, plus marketing.

daseiner1 6y ago
missing the key detail that their first and (as far as i’m aware) still biggest customers are the military and law enforcement
- bigiain 6y ago
  And Saudi government "diplomatic teams" with bone saws...
- tdeck 6y ago
  I figured everyone already knew that, my point was just that the tech itself may not be very impressive.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

snarfy 6y ago

Bossware, but also for governments.

jazzyjackson 6y ago

"Palantir software is a Java-based platform for analyzing, integrating, and visualizing several types of data, including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. In addition to accessing all natively connected data sources, such as ... Palantir's import process allows Warfighters to easily draw in any other types of data, such as unstructured message traffic, structured identity data, link charts, spreadsheets, phone data, and documents. Palantir has a link analysis tool similar to Axis-Pro, Analyst Notebook (ANB) and the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) Standard Cloud (DSC), which are currently used in theater. The Palantir platform uses advanced database technologies, combined with a sophisticated front-end GUI that enables extraction, transformation, and linked of varied datasets. Palantir uses a revisioning database, also known as version control, to documentall modifications performed on objects and entities in the database. Users of Palantir can perform dynamic modeling scenarios in which they manually create links between unrelated objects and entities that update across all datasets in the repository without permanently changing any of the original data" Essentially a graph database that plays well with geospatial polygon and route searches along with time series', useful for trawling through all your surveillance data and putting together who-did-what to decide who to, erm, target There's a few screenshots and also pretty interesting user reviews in this Operational Assessment Report published by US Army April 2012 Actually here's my favorite user report on how they use the software, page B-6: "Look for bad guys. Find out who and what those guys are connected to." https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/08/1830_001.pdf https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2012/08/1830_0...

hogFeast 6y ago
So Neo4J (I think that has versioning?) with AirFlow? Seriously, I have never quite understood what all these unstructured data companies do. Autonomy had quite a big product...which, as far as I can tell, was largely about spending heavily on sales and trying to get companies to pay you for warehousing data (with very little of the AI wizardry they claimed to be selling). I think there a publicly listed company that also does this kind of thing...I don't get it. I understand why you can charge an unsophisticated company to hoover up all their useless data, I am not sure how much actual tech is being deployed here beyond that database. EDIT: I think I am recalling Elastic, which I think has an unstructured data business...maybe that is just my imagination.

jariel 6y ago

Palantir is just CGI or Accenture or Booz Allen or IBM, but focused on Defence, Security etc.. They have devs with 'clearance' and the 'vibe and BS' of a Silicon Valley firm. So their BS is more focused than Accenture BS. To be somewhat less cynical - almost all companies have difficulty with IT. I worked at a large handset maker that did some seriously important things, and our IT was delerious. It was as bad as a random cracker company. To do internal reporting, data warehousing, etc we were incompetent. Even companies that are able to transition their core product offers to being more 'tech' still lack operational technical capability. It's hard, and there's so much churn it's difficult to even tell 'who is good, who is not, how much it should really cost'.