6 ms·

I just don't get it. NHS needs a big data platform so they go to a... spy tech company? Why are they so insistent that it must be Palantir that builds this, ins

by cedws 3y ago

I just don't get it. NHS needs a big data platform so they go to a... spy tech company? Why are they so insistent that it must be Palantir that builds this, instead of choosing from a dozen of other consulting companies that don't have a dodgy track record? Ideally the NHS would just build it in house, but sadly it's a slow and bloated organisation unable to innovate (as most government managed things usually become).

c1b 3y ago
As someone familiar with the USG data management tech landscape — it’s probably because it’s by far the best product with no remotely close second.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  What would be the second in your opinion, even if it's not close?
  - c1b 3y ago
    It varies by agency — either something built in house (very bad) or built by a company that knows how to acquire government contracts, of which there are few - the set of which frankly always has worse tech than Palantir. If product efficacy is not absolutely critical, the acquisition process will be driven by nepotism or other forms of corruption. As an example for the second case in DoD space, there’s Advana.
- cedws 3y ago
  Which product specifically? As I understand Palantir has several products and the NHS isn't buying one of them but paying for something bespoke.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    https://www.palantir.com/uk/healthcare/ https://www.palantir.com/uk/healthcare/ They are using palantir foundry, which is palantir's big data platform, or how they call it: "The Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise"
    - ak_111 3y ago
      What they call it doesn't sound like legendary marketing that I was expecting.
- worik 3y ago
  > As someone familiar with the USG data management tech landscape — it’s probably because it’s by far the best product with no remotely close second. That is sweetly naive, unless you are talking about their marketing department
  - brobinson 3y ago
    What are the better products that are available?
  - c1b 3y ago
    Let me rephrase: I am extremely familiar with the USG data management tech landscape.
    - ghc 3y ago
      I'd love to know (in as much detail as you are allowed) what you feel the strengths and weaknesses of CHEETAS is.
      - c1b 3y ago
        I cannot comment specifically on CHEETAS, but what I can say is that USG developing in house software solutions almost always produces a disastrous product that goes over budget and has extreme maintenance overhead. To see why, you can simply ask yourself: do you think that the unelected officials overseeing government agencies that embark on enterprise software development projects have sufficient expertise and enterprise software project management experience to be able to do this well? Furthermore, do you think that the quality of engineers that the NHS or DoD can attract with less than half of the compensation of an actual software company stands a chance at developing something good in house? It’s unfortunately almost impossible for these projects to go right.
        lmeyerov 3y ago
        Interesting, thank you for sharing! That experience speaks more to the perils of in-housing, not to why Palantir is the best COTS for specific needs here. Are there specific leading COTS here you view it so far ahead of for such a contract? Closer to our own practice.. Modern LLMs have basically reset the field for SOTA in this space, with Palantir, by definition, being behind OpenAI in the most basic tasks, and thus being in the same race as everyone else to retool. Speaking from our own USG experience, we are deep tech leads in some other intelligence areas (graph, ...), and before OpenAI, often chose to adopt prev-gen leading LLM models (BERT, ...) for tasks closer to the NLP side as we recognized that wasn't where our deep tech had an inhouse advantage. We basically had to start over on some of those projects there as soon as GPT4 came out because it just changed so much that the incumbent advantages of already being delivering on a contract were a dead end for core functionality, and almost a year later, it's now obvious that it was the right choice when we get compared to companies that haven't been. Palantir has been publicly resetting as well for using GenAI era tech, which suggests the same situation.
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
Why isn't the universities being used to solve these problems
- filoleg 3y ago
  Probably because the quality of the final end-user software produced by universities is less than what a company like Palantir would produce. It is kind of amazing what you can create if you have hundreds (if not thousands) of really well paid SWEs with industry experience of working on real products used by people who pay money for it. As opposed to a bunch of really smart (and really underpaid, looking at the stipend amounts) grad students who know a lot about their specific domain, but lack the industry experience and proper product management. Add on top of that that Palantir will dedicate engineers just for their big customers, just so that they can assist with integrating and customizing the product the way the customer wants. Palantir literally has a role for that called Forward-Deployed Engineer, and they will fly out to wherever the customer is to address whatever issues they have. Even if all else was equal, there is no way a university would be able to do that. P.S. Don’t get me wrong, universities can produce groundbreaking and amazing software that will live on outside of the university walls. But it would be usually rough cutting edge prototypes with zero customer support of the type that companies and governments typically look for.
- numpad0 3y ago
  Universities as magical R&D powerhouse model don't seem to be working for past few decades indeed...
hkt 3y ago
> Ideally the NHS would just build it in house, but sadly it's a slow and bloated organisation unable to innovate (as most government managed things usually become). Several government departments have robust in-house data platforms already. The Ministry of Justice does, the Department for International Trade as well. I've personally worked on the former and have pulled code from the latter. (the code I've looked at from DfIT was https://github.com/uktrade/fargatespawner https://github.com/uktrade/fargatespawner )
- ilikerashers 3y ago
  I've heard some horror stories from HMCTS (part of MOJ) and the Home Office. While there might be some good intentions, buying a vendor product is often better for large organisations rather than running their warehouses, ETL and Databricks. Just too much overhead and specialist skills required.
chaps 3y ago
Palantir offers a LOT of services to government orgs. So it's probably something akin to packaging more than one product in one.
dwroberts 3y ago
We currently have a Conservative government, and they hate the NHS. Anything they can do to sink the NHS or destroy its reputation and push people toward private healthcare is a win to them. I wouldn't be surprised if this Palantir stuff involves an extremely onerous contract, and probably terms that the NHS cannot even afford long term, and the Tories knowingly entered into it any way.
- ak_111 3y ago
  I am afraid you can't simply blame the conservative for this. This is a total societal breakdown, and I am not being dramatic if you consider other simultaneous scandals such as PPE. By that I mean it is impressive how this could happen in one of the foremost liberal society with a large well-funded media representing the whole political spectrum, fiercely adversarial two-party politics, respect for institutional whistleblowers (so long as they don't involve foreign policy) and finally an independent civil service. All of those layers failed to put a stop to this or even to shed an intense light on it for the public. Far more than the conservatives had failed to let this get through. In fact what is amazing is the public barely aware of its existence as a news story. Try asking a few of your non-tech friends about it. Even the twitter mob failed on this.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > with a large well-funded media representing the whole political spectrum I'm reasonably sure the UK media tilts mostly rightwards with only a tiny strand on the left and a small chunk of centrism.
    - seeAls0 3y ago
      [dead]
  - dwroberts 3y ago
    > other simultaneous scandals such as PPE. Also performed by the conservative government? I mean that sets the precedent for kick-backs as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if, after losing the next election, a bunch of sitting Conservative MPs go and mysteriously work for Palantir (Greensill all over again and - oh and hey, David Cameron's reputation is being rehabilitated right now by having him in government again, funny that)
blue_cookeh 3y ago
> Ideally the NHS would just build it in house, but sadly it's a slow and bloated organisation unable to innovate (as most government managed things usually become). This is patently false, a narrative often parroted by people who don't understand or have never worked in the NHS. There are many intelligent people in technical/digital roles in the NHS that innovate on a daily basis - heck, many build systems internally at a hugely reduced cost compared to outsourcing yet decisions come from parliament/gov agencies that overrule internal decision making and waste insane amounts of cash on vanity projects, or scrapping internal work to be redone by the likes of Accenture.
- 0xy 3y ago
  Given the NHS' costs continue to explode, and most of the cash goes straight to padding middle management, it seems easy to see that it's a slow and bloated organization. After all, the UK's health spending is increasing at a rate 2,000% higher than close neighbor France's is -- indicating massive fraud and waste.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    That "increasing at a rate" vague phrasing makes me instinctively suspicious of abused statistics. For example, suppose in 24 hours France's spending goes up +0% and the UK's spending goes up +0.001%: "Oh my god! The UK's spending is increasing at a rate infinity times more!!11"
    - 0xy 3y ago
      The time period was 2010 to 2019. Even since 2019, the NHS has several hundred billion in planned budget increases. My favorite thing about dysfunctional UK political rhetoric is when someone will say "the Conservatives are slashing the NHS!" when what they really mean is that they've slightly decreased the rate of increase, so by every metric it's still skyrocketing (but not enough to those who want to dump infinite cash in the middle management growth machine). Another fun factoid: the pro-Brexit crew were chided for claiming they'd increase NHS funding by 350m Euros a week. Since Brexit, NHS funding has actually increased by more than double that. Nothing can stop the NHS cash burning. Expand middle management at all costs. Nevermind that we're outspending comparable countries with comparable health pressures.
gumballindie 3y ago
> must be Palantir Corruption. Bro leading Palantir has friends in high places. It’s easy.
xyst 3y ago
Because to build a dodgy, possibly unethical system. Usually the most unethical company (and one that won’t cost a shit ton of money) will be the first ones that politicians or government will pick. Sure gov can build it in house but the system itself is a PR nightmare. Any unethical use and the current administration will be blamed. By subcontracting it out, gov has an easy out. - “oh there was a bad subcontractor misusing the system. It WaSnT uS!1!!” - “oh it was just one bad actor within government. We sent person to black site. ItS NoT a SyStEmIc iSSuE”
asdadsdad 3y ago
I honestly don't understand what's dodgy about Palantir. They build a platform to analyze big data and they have clients like government agencies, immigration control and law enforcement. What's the big deal here? Please educate me
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Mostly its founding history. Funded by CIA’s venture arm, was basically built bespoke for the CIA and rest of the USIC. These days, yeah, at least a large portion of the company (+product) is a pretty normal enterprise software company that happens to build data platforms.
numpad0 3y ago
Palantir products gets very little public exposure aside from mockup-looking advertisement materials, I'm sure it would have been cloned as an OSS if we were in 90s so long it amounts to anything substantial, yet there is none. That feels weird.
bufio 3y ago
The UK government's phobia of doing anything in-house almost certainly stems from the enormous amount of money that the political class makes from government contracts. The NHS could be as slow and bloated as a whale corpse, but doing everything in-house would probably still be more successful than contracting fraudster companies.

by cedws 3y ago

c1b 3y ago

As someone familiar with the USG data management tech landscape — it’s probably because it’s by far the best product with no remotely close second.

SushiHippie 3y ago
What would be the second in your opinion, even if it's not close?
- c1b 3y ago
  It varies by agency — either something built in house (very bad) or built by a company that knows how to acquire government contracts, of which there are few - the set of which frankly always has worse tech than Palantir. If product efficacy is not absolutely critical, the acquisition process will be driven by nepotism or other forms of corruption. As an example for the second case in DoD space, there’s Advana.
cedws 3y ago
Which product specifically? As I understand Palantir has several products and the NHS isn't buying one of them but paying for something bespoke.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  https://www.palantir.com/uk/healthcare/ https://www.palantir.com/uk/healthcare/ They are using palantir foundry, which is palantir's big data platform, or how they call it: "The Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise"
  - ak_111 3y ago
    What they call it doesn't sound like legendary marketing that I was expecting.
worik 3y ago
> As someone familiar with the USG data management tech landscape — it’s probably because it’s by far the best product with no remotely close second. That is sweetly naive, unless you are talking about their marketing department
- brobinson 3y ago
  What are the better products that are available?
- c1b 3y ago
  Let me rephrase: I am extremely familiar with the USG data management tech landscape.
  - ghc 3y ago
    I'd love to know (in as much detail as you are allowed) what you feel the strengths and weaknesses of CHEETAS is.
    - c1b 3y ago
      I cannot comment specifically on CHEETAS, but what I can say is that USG developing in house software solutions almost always produces a disastrous product that goes over budget and has extreme maintenance overhead. To see why, you can simply ask yourself: do you think that the unelected officials overseeing government agencies that embark on enterprise software development projects have sufficient expertise and enterprise software project management experience to be able to do this well? Furthermore, do you think that the quality of engineers that the NHS or DoD can attract with less than half of the compensation of an actual software company stands a chance at developing something good in house? It’s unfortunately almost impossible for these projects to go right.
      - lmeyerov 3y ago
        Interesting, thank you for sharing! That experience speaks more to the perils of in-housing, not to why Palantir is the best COTS for specific needs here. Are there specific leading COTS here you view it so far ahead of for such a contract? Closer to our own practice.. Modern LLMs have basically reset the field for SOTA in this space, with Palantir, by definition, being behind OpenAI in the most basic tasks, and thus being in the same race as everyone else to retool. Speaking from our own USG experience, we are deep tech leads in some other intelligence areas (graph, ...), and before OpenAI, often chose to adopt prev-gen leading LLM models (BERT, ...) for tasks closer to the NLP side as we recognized that wasn't where our deep tech had an inhouse advantage. We basically had to start over on some of those projects there as soon as GPT4 came out because it just changed so much that the incumbent advantages of already being delivering on a contract were a dead end for core functionality, and almost a year later, it's now obvious that it was the right choice when we get compared to companies that haven't been. Palantir has been publicly resetting as well for using GenAI era tech, which suggests the same situation.

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago

Why isn't the universities being used to solve these problems

filoleg 3y ago
Probably because the quality of the final end-user software produced by universities is less than what a company like Palantir would produce. It is kind of amazing what you can create if you have hundreds (if not thousands) of really well paid SWEs with industry experience of working on real products used by people who pay money for it. As opposed to a bunch of really smart (and really underpaid, looking at the stipend amounts) grad students who know a lot about their specific domain, but lack the industry experience and proper product management. Add on top of that that Palantir will dedicate engineers just for their big customers, just so that they can assist with integrating and customizing the product the way the customer wants. Palantir literally has a role for that called Forward-Deployed Engineer, and they will fly out to wherever the customer is to address whatever issues they have. Even if all else was equal, there is no way a university would be able to do that. P.S. Don’t get me wrong, universities can produce groundbreaking and amazing software that will live on outside of the university walls. But it would be usually rough cutting edge prototypes with zero customer support of the type that companies and governments typically look for.
numpad0 3y ago
Universities as magical R&D powerhouse model don't seem to be working for past few decades indeed...

hkt 3y ago

> Ideally the NHS would just build it in house, but sadly it's a slow and bloated organisation unable to innovate (as most government managed things usually become). Several government departments have robust in-house data platforms already. The Ministry of Justice does, the Department for International Trade as well. I've personally worked on the former and have pulled code from the latter. (the code I've looked at from DfIT was https://github.com/uktrade/fargatespawner https://github.com/uktrade/fargatespawner )

ilikerashers 3y ago
I've heard some horror stories from HMCTS (part of MOJ) and the Home Office. While there might be some good intentions, buying a vendor product is often better for large organisations rather than running their warehouses, ETL and Databricks. Just too much overhead and specialist skills required.

chaps 3y ago

Palantir offers a LOT of services to government orgs. So it's probably something akin to packaging more than one product in one.

dwroberts 3y ago

We currently have a Conservative government, and they hate the NHS. Anything they can do to sink the NHS or destroy its reputation and push people toward private healthcare is a win to them. I wouldn't be surprised if this Palantir stuff involves an extremely onerous contract, and probably terms that the NHS cannot even afford long term, and the Tories knowingly entered into it any way.

ak_111 3y ago
I am afraid you can't simply blame the conservative for this. This is a total societal breakdown, and I am not being dramatic if you consider other simultaneous scandals such as PPE. By that I mean it is impressive how this could happen in one of the foremost liberal society with a large well-funded media representing the whole political spectrum, fiercely adversarial two-party politics, respect for institutional whistleblowers (so long as they don't involve foreign policy) and finally an independent civil service. All of those layers failed to put a stop to this or even to shed an intense light on it for the public. Far more than the conservatives had failed to let this get through. In fact what is amazing is the public barely aware of its existence as a news story. Try asking a few of your non-tech friends about it. Even the twitter mob failed on this.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > with a large well-funded media representing the whole political spectrum I'm reasonably sure the UK media tilts mostly rightwards with only a tiny strand on the left and a small chunk of centrism.
  - seeAls0 3y ago
    [dead]
- dwroberts 3y ago
  > other simultaneous scandals such as PPE. Also performed by the conservative government? I mean that sets the precedent for kick-backs as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if, after losing the next election, a bunch of sitting Conservative MPs go and mysteriously work for Palantir (Greensill all over again and - oh and hey, David Cameron's reputation is being rehabilitated right now by having him in government again, funny that)

blue_cookeh 3y ago

> Ideally the NHS would just build it in house, but sadly it's a slow and bloated organisation unable to innovate (as most government managed things usually become). This is patently false, a narrative often parroted by people who don't understand or have never worked in the NHS. There are many intelligent people in technical/digital roles in the NHS that innovate on a daily basis - heck, many build systems internally at a hugely reduced cost compared to outsourcing yet decisions come from parliament/gov agencies that overrule internal decision making and waste insane amounts of cash on vanity projects, or scrapping internal work to be redone by the likes of Accenture.

0xy 3y ago
Given the NHS' costs continue to explode, and most of the cash goes straight to padding middle management, it seems easy to see that it's a slow and bloated organization. After all, the UK's health spending is increasing at a rate 2,000% higher than close neighbor France's is -- indicating massive fraud and waste.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  That "increasing at a rate" vague phrasing makes me instinctively suspicious of abused statistics. For example, suppose in 24 hours France's spending goes up +0% and the UK's spending goes up +0.001%: "Oh my god! The UK's spending is increasing at a rate infinity times more!!11"
  - 0xy 3y ago
    The time period was 2010 to 2019. Even since 2019, the NHS has several hundred billion in planned budget increases. My favorite thing about dysfunctional UK political rhetoric is when someone will say "the Conservatives are slashing the NHS!" when what they really mean is that they've slightly decreased the rate of increase, so by every metric it's still skyrocketing (but not enough to those who want to dump infinite cash in the middle management growth machine). Another fun factoid: the pro-Brexit crew were chided for claiming they'd increase NHS funding by 350m Euros a week. Since Brexit, NHS funding has actually increased by more than double that. Nothing can stop the NHS cash burning. Expand middle management at all costs. Nevermind that we're outspending comparable countries with comparable health pressures.

gumballindie 3y ago

> must be Palantir Corruption. Bro leading Palantir has friends in high places. It’s easy.

xyst 3y ago

Because to build a dodgy, possibly unethical system. Usually the most unethical company (and one that won’t cost a shit ton of money) will be the first ones that politicians or government will pick. Sure gov can build it in house but the system itself is a PR nightmare. Any unethical use and the current administration will be blamed. By subcontracting it out, gov has an easy out. - “oh there was a bad subcontractor misusing the system. It WaSnT uS!1!!” - “oh it was just one bad actor within government. We sent person to black site. ItS NoT a SyStEmIc iSSuE”

asdadsdad 3y ago

I honestly don't understand what's dodgy about Palantir. They build a platform to analyze big data and they have clients like government agencies, immigration control and law enforcement. What's the big deal here? Please educate me

ethanbond 3y ago
Mostly its founding history. Funded by CIA’s venture arm, was basically built bespoke for the CIA and rest of the USIC. These days, yeah, at least a large portion of the company (+product) is a pretty normal enterprise software company that happens to build data platforms.

numpad0 3y ago

Palantir products gets very little public exposure aside from mockup-looking advertisement materials, I'm sure it would have been cloned as an OSS if we were in 90s so long it amounts to anything substantial, yet there is none. That feels weird.

bufio 3y ago

The UK government's phobia of doing anything in-house almost certainly stems from the enormous amount of money that the political class makes from government contracts. The NHS could be as slow and bloated as a whale corpse, but doing everything in-house would probably still be more successful than contracting fraudster companies.