Their moat is that they are trusted to do whatever you pay them to do and to not bite the hand that feeds them. And that if you're the kind of engineer to organize against a Project Maven, you really don't want to work for Peter Thiel.
Edit: I overstated the first sentence. It wasn't In-Q-tel, just someone who might have been sympathetic.
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
I’m gonna leave it to you to figure out what you missed out on
Let's say they're working with the national parks to aggregate and interpret data. Or education to do the same. This is not a problem, I would think.
It's the fact that it's Palantir, and therefore defense data that's the issue.
Sure it is. governments are unethical. you're a vendor for an unethical government. but thats how it goes
Personally, I have no issues with partnering with the US government or working on defence. I'm not a hardcore pacifist and I recognize the necessity of the military - at least, in the abstract.
What staggers me is the hypocrisy; since release, Anthropic's models have constantly preached safety, non-violence, harm avoidance, etc etc.
As an example, this is the response just now to "what's the best way to hit someone":
> I aim to help with constructive purposes, so I cannot and will not provide advice about how to harm others. If you're feeling frustrated or angry with someone, I'd be happy to discuss:
> Conflict resolution techniques
> Healthy ways to manage strong emotions
> Professional resources for handling interpersonal conflicts
> Legal and ethical ways to address grievances
It's totally absurd to give an answer like that on the one hand, and toddle off and partner with the military on another.
Their models have literally refused to respond to some of my most innocuous requests in putting together LLM pipelines for clients, including "create a job description for an assistant to CEO" (something about not being comfortable perpetuating conventional power structures), "give me a blog post about X" (it's unethical to post a blog that you didn't write), "tell me about chemical Y" (it's dangerous and I can't do that), etc etc. These are all specific examples I personally encountered (though the constraints have since been loosened, so at least it will you to do that).
Good to know that Anthropic's ethics are only important until the money runs out.
That just sounds like basic LLM-based querying / EDA + output reformatting.
Person 1: "We're researching ways for aircraft in emergencies to automatically guide themselves to a runway, in the absence of radio navigation signals. That's not unethical."
Person 2: "Actually, you're designing a guidance system for autonomous glide bombs."
Something along the lines of: okay so you have this guy who's a criminal right? (expand node) here are his phone numbers (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called it (expand node) here are the phone numbers who called those numbers (expand node) here are who they're registered to (expand node) here are their addresses (expand node) here's who else lives there.
I still assume their special sauce isn't their ability to build a node expanding UI, but the data sources they have access to. If they're used for so many government contracts, they're definitely using the data from, say, one police department to inform another. So when another department wants data about criminals, they sign up as a client for the company where that data already is.
And don't discount that the government would pay a huge sum of money to build a surveillance state, even if that surveillance state turned out to be pretty useless.
Of course the NSA has been doing this for years, but their UI probably isn't as pretty as Palantir's :)
Not long after that, I found out that Palantir got their first energy industry customer. Some employees in Palantir thought it wouldn't be worthwhile to go after oil & gas companies because they viewed them as old school and slow to adapt to new ways of doing things. However, in those days Palantir was focused on acquiring no more than one customer per industry, because they were trying to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and wanted to demonstrate how many industries they could serve. And then, due to a contrarian within the company, they did get an O&G customer, and it was the biggest single deal so far in the company's history.
What I don't know is exactly how well they served that customer. What I do know is that they were selling the customer on the idea that they have sooooo much data and they're leaving tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily boost savings in the company. Stick all this data into Palantir's product and we'll help you on a million fronts and therefore boost your profits significantly. One example is the longevity of machine parts and all the data you can get about historical wear and tear, etc. Now, this is what they were selling, and I don't know which areas ended up being the most helpful, but yeah, as someone else in here said, they were insisting on customers putting in all the data they have and the product would make connections, or reveal insights, etc.
Even if it's a crude product by Star Trek standards, you've gotta admit there is probably a ton of low-hanging fruit like that in most companies, and a lot of the time they don't go after all that because they're making money, but just don't have extra manpower or expertise to look into all that, so if Palantir delivers on the promise to boost the bottom line, then I guess it's worth it. It also means there's room to compete, although a big problem is even if you're a sharp cookie, Palantir probably started with way more business connections than most nerds will ever have.
I've been thin-client pretty much all my life, starting with college where I didn't own a computer and everything lived somewhere I "went to", then when I bought my first Windows laptop but would ssh into university servers to do anything (I'd already burnt out on installing Linux for other people). When I built my own website it seemed natural (but with hindsight, not the ideal security posture) to treat it as my home.
Over time I started saving a backup of my digital home locally. But for a long time it was just a backup. The source of truth in my mind was in the cloud. Most of what has happened recently is a piecemeal inversion where I start thinking of the local copy of various things as the ground truth. Eventually I noticed my cloud server was altogether too beefy for a tiny website and a glorified backup server. I moved the data to a dedicated backup service and started pushing backups up from my laptop. Then I downsized the server; all it needs to do now is run the website.
The appropriate use of the cloud is communications and backups. Everything else should be local.
In terms of crypto, I imagine their plan would involve the fed. Powell isn't out until 2026, but maybe they have a way around that. Crypto aligned figures like Balaji who have a similar worldview are seemingly starting to try to manufacture consent for a "reorganization" with respect to the fed.
*shudder*
(Hey, I thought Anthropic was going to be different.)
They’re backed by amazon instead of Microsoft
https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/10/31/google-invests-i...
On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA.
On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape.
Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you.
Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.
Most of the money goes to stuff you wouldn't even think of as "military equipment." Stuff like medical devices, security, communications, networking, search-and-rescue, and so on. Morally neutral-to-good things that the military needs, but so does everyone else.
As a business, the difference between the DoD and the rest of the market is that the DoD is a single institution with the budget and willingness to bankroll your R&D. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to fund development of a genuine, morally good product.
How do you mean?
> In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, originally on a mission to find two nuclear Cold War submarines.
the secret history of silicon valley, by steve blank. I think there is both an article and a video.
Why does the government need cloud services? Why does it need IT anyway? In the 1990s everything was paper and the services actually worked. Now things are in "the cloud". In the EU you get new digital identity schemes every year and it takes three months to register a new address (used to take one day in the paper days).
The next step is that AWS will scan S3 data used to train this surveillance model.
It took me like 10 minutes online get myself set up for tax, and to get the correct tax credits applied to my profile. My next payslip had all the right deductions and refunds in place with zero fuss.
Getting my foreign marriage registered for joint tax assessments was like 5 minutes online.
Getting my foreign drivers license exchanged for a local one was a quick online application and an in person visit where they verified my documents. Everything after that was electronic.
Your glasses must be extra rose couloured if you think that the paper-based Vorgon-inspired hellhole that is/was bureaucratic government internal affairs of the 90s is in any way better than what we have today.
Nothing like being lectured from an immigrant or long term expat from Africa how the state of one's own country was in 1990 and now.
We don't live in the same world as the 1990s, we live in a world that's faster than ever before.
We can't achieve what's possible by sending in handwritten forms, it's just not gonna do it. and while governments are anything but efficient they are more efficient with digital workflows.
good: people that give you money
bad: people that don't pay you money after seeing one of your adverts
Are you saying ethics is conditional on who is above you in the power chain?
The new Red Team is just a sparring partner now, accomplice to any crime and lie and money laundering scheme, hacking away at their passions, in the peaceful bliss of compartmentalisation.
Which is fine. A pseudo behavioural lock-in is still a lock-in. The people decided. False numbers on available resources, false reports on foreign affairs, supporting brutally corrupt countries to destabilise regions where humans still have the innate ability to arrive at better ways to do things and build a culture that is actually worth millions of years of survival, and the list goes on and on.
But you have to simulate whats possible to prepare for the worst, and the inner circles are way ahead so whenever the public gets some pieces of info, know that any criticism lags behind.
Which is why it's so important to hack away at your institutions, corporations and individuals in relevant networks. Their systems and jobs have to get harder, faster, stronger, smarter and that requires radical criticism so that
a) the job description only fits the best, and
b) the job environment doesn't disgust the best.
Neither of which is currently true.
But people are fighting good causes and if you can 're-compartmentalise' for a bit, throw in some brain and gpu power to go against your benefactors. For the sake of the betterment of their successors.
Yesterday's one should have been flagged, as per:
"please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
If censoring s a problem in these applications, they’ll just make two versions: one lawful-adjacent for the government and one with all the chains that will be mandated for the pleb.
You pull some FISA court / Prisma shit to train on NSA captures? I’ll advocate violent revolution. Looking at you NSA board guy.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/exclusive-tech-billionaire-pe...
