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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.
by 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 agoWhat would be the second in your opinion, even if it's not close?
- c1b 3y agoIt 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 agoWhich 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 agohttps://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 agoWhat 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 agoWhat are the better products that are available?
- c1b 3y agoLet me rephrase: I am extremely familiar with the USG data management tech landscape.
- ghc 3y agoI'd love to know (in as much detail as you are allowed) what you feel the strengths and weaknesses of CHEETAS is.
- c1b 3y agoI 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 agoInteresting, 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.