Reflections on Palantir

https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir

by freditup • 2 years ago

482 374 2 years ago

nabeelqu.substack.com

newprint• 2 years ago

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.

maeil3• 2 years ago

They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models.

One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant.

The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks".

The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.

Manuel_D2• 2 years ago

When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation.

A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed.

One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.

hammock2• 2 years ago

So it’s hygiene and structure

browningstreet• 2 years ago

In many of the enterprise orgs I've worked in, the two tech teams that are chronically understaffed are 1) info sec, 2) DBA/ data architecture/ data science. I'm lumping those 3 together on purpose, because they're always understaffed and typically not empowered to build anything.

thimkerbell2• 2 years ago

So if they are dumping data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore, which one is the active database going forward? In 2024.

sroerick• 2 years ago

People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my experience this is the actual hard work of producing something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS resellers will never be able to deliver on.

LarsDu88• 2 years ago

So basically data warehousing, and making it possible to do joins?

Super boring, but super important stuff, which I've seen neglected at far too many places I've worked.

Sounds like data engineering with a dash of ML.

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

This is a good post to explain the value proposition. It sounds like "Big Data" from the 1990s, but a very good salesperson was able to infiltrate some US gov orgs to sell the idea.

rsynnott• 2 years ago

This all just sounds like any other consulting company, really?

stephencoyner2• 2 years ago

They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling.

Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system. Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional large-scale operations.

Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on Palantir's platform and benefit from their security infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with the foundations handled for you. While the product just launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time. From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to save lots of it.

NicoJuicy• 2 years ago

Now is the perfect time

The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already went way up.

Palantir... Not so much

melling• 2 years ago

The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost tripled.

It’s quite expensive now.

I would encourage you to do your own research.

For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100.

I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.

sakopov• 2 years ago

If you were buying in the $6s, it nearly 7x'ed in like a year

rabf3• 2 years ago

One of the reasons I still frequent this forum is to countertrade the espoused opinions. Meta@100 was such an easy buy, Everyone was talking as if they were going out of business because they did not like the idea of the metaverse. A quick look at their earnings said that was utter nonsesnse. So bizarre to see all jounalists and many users here to attribute the turn around to them pivoting to AI when that was not at all what the CEO was saying during that time. Always look for primary sources, opinions are funny.

nodesocket• 2 years ago

HN has always lacked economic and stock market knowledge and instincts generally speaking. Most comments tend to say it’s rigged, evil capitalist, etc. Guessing because hackers generally tend to swing far left and socialist though weird as a lot of founder and entrepreneurs are active on HN as well.

There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the opposite is also true with praise and admiration of failures.

joewhale• 2 years ago

It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these large govt contracts first in their space wins.

swordsmith• 2 years ago

I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy.

Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.

hermitcrab• 2 years ago

RAG?

alexpetralia• 2 years ago

"End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold claim from a single service provider.

Here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ

Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.

justmarc• 2 years ago

It certainly sounds like they've created an excellent product both for its value to the customer as well as value to their shareholders.

That's what companies should all be built and optimized to do. That's what it's about.

sangnoir2• 2 years ago

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model

AFAICT, it is government & government-adjacent contracting using techniques borrowed from big tech and WITCH, since big tech won't directly court government sw contracts, and WITCH may fail at getting clearances for foreign-based personnel.

ericjmorey• 2 years ago

WITCH?

sleepybrett• 2 years ago

your own private digital cia, for hire to the highest bidder.

itronitron• 2 years ago

They're like Oracle in that they focus their sales activity on the untouchable managers of managers, but their focus is on data integration and data analytics.

jgalt2125• 2 years ago

246 PE, with a $94B market cap.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/

Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.

jgalt2125• 2 years ago

As best I can tell only ARM has a higher PE and Market Cap.

https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/

airstrike7• 2 years ago

Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded.

Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x, maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today

airstrike7• 2 years ago

Not every company trades on P/E. Some trade on EBITDA, others on Revenue. It's a spectrum. The more mature (code for more profitable, lower growth), the more likely it trades on P/E.

Palantir has $0.09 earnings per share. 2023 was the first year they were profitable. So P/E isn't the right metric to look at here.

Also no investor ever trades on _trailing_ metrics. It's all about forward earnings, but 99.999999% of valuation multiples you see online are trailing metrics (or use questionable forward estimates pulled from some aggregate which is also just noise instead of actually diligencing estimates)

specialsits• 2 years ago

It's always amusing when armchair investors throw around financial metrics meant for entirely different types of companies, just to sound knowledgeable because they've heard others repeat the same lazy jargon.

cgh2• 2 years ago

Honest question from someone who "armchair invests" in broad-market ETFs: what metrics would I look at for a company like Palantir? I'm not asking for investment lessons. Just your opinion and some links would be fine.

chvid• 2 years ago

Curious why this is downvoted. Crazy high PE / general valuation for a company that as far as I can tell mostly does IT consulting/contracting - sure they are in a growth sector - but still - plenty of other companies can do what they do.

nuz• 2 years ago

Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755

jedimind3• 2 years ago

Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read "Judea Declares War on Germany." This headline was in response to a worldwide boycott of German goods organized by Jewish groups to protest against the early actions of the Nazi government, such as the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany.

The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar international actions to claim that the global Jewish community was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust. The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden. His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of his denial of reality.

At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions", which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation, but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived "thought crimes".

So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a colonized people whose children, in the same year - months before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli occupation as they have done for decades: At least 507 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023, including at least 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik...]

Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose your land and property why would you care about the identity of your oppressor?

Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video shared across social media where he states: “We don’t hate Jews and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist him.”

Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes which the western world finds appealing.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity.

That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating...

Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.

jedimind3• 2 years ago

ADDENDUM: "2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank" PUBLISHED: 18 Sep 2023 i.e. BEFORE OCT 7 https://www.savethechildren.net/news/2023-marks-deadliest-ye... (this is the actual article I should have referenced)

"18 Sept 2023 - At least 38 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began, said Save the Children."

EasyMark• 2 years ago

Thiel knows how to get rich and I’ll give him that, however I would never trust his reptilian takes on geopolitics or anything else outside of business strategy and even then I might limit it to stuff he’s working on in the past.

tdeck• 2 years ago

During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.

Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.

orochimaaru4• 2 years ago

So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants.

I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.

stackskipton• 2 years ago

You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.

Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff.

When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.

nxobject4• 2 years ago

I'm sure there are plenty of people who say no to working on improving Facebook engagement, DoubleClick etc. for that reason! As opposed, to, say, something like the calming algorithm YouTube uses with its comments.

(Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden – i.e. its disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc. Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire countries are painted black.)

NegatioN• 2 years ago

"Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle

What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?

julianeon2• 2 years ago

Factually untrue.

I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough.

The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well.

About "sin" industries:

"Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers. As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work in those sectors.

Shog9• 2 years ago

You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies" here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for the spooks, they also provide phone service.

So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.

moolcool5• 2 years ago

Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas

I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections to Meta specifically.

int_19h2• 2 years ago

You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs.

To be fair, most countries don't routinely bomb some random folk halfway across the world. So if you work on defense tech there, there is a less immediate connection between what you do and people dying.

subjectsigma3• 2 years ago

I work for a government contractor that does quite a number of things for a diverse set of agencies. You would be amazed at the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves you are some sort of child-eating monster. 80% of the time they have absolutely no idea what my company does nor what working for the military is actually like.

“Where do you work?”

“Oh at $COMPANY.”

“I hear they work in missile defense technology, you should be ashamed. Gaza Israel blah blah blah”

“Oh, well sorry you feel that way.”

“So how many innocent children you bombed this week?”

“Actually zero, I spent the week writing Ansible and bash scripts. Then I went to a presentation about a team trying to stop $COUNTRY from hacking into the electric grid and shutting down power to hospitals. Then I read a report about improving 911 tech backends and other emergency services. Then I had lunch with my friend, who works in forensics catching sex traffickers, and he told me some crazy stories.”

“Wow I didn’t know you guys did all that stuff at $COMPANY…”

“Sounds about right…”

paulpauper• 2 years ago

Almost all tech acts as surveillance. Anything that records an IP address or GEO data is surveillance.

akira2501• 2 years ago

So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_ work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality that seems to encompass this entire operation.

"A boring dystopia as a service."

Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|

partomniscient• 2 years ago

I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was about it.

tolerance4• 2 years ago

It's public relations. Palantir is Not Bad™.

eezing• 2 years ago

It’s Salesforce v2. A ridiculously expensive proprietary “easy-to-build” application platform with an ecosystem of ridiculously expensive consultants.

SpicyLemonZest• 2 years ago

Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias people have against against application platforms requiring a consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are some areas where it's the right model to get things done efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf furnace.

wbl• 2 years ago

US steel very infamously did not do any R&D and stuck to outmoded technology.

fnwbr• 2 years ago

you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things

lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into democratic institutions

FactKnower69• 2 years ago

he worked at palantir for 8 years dude, do you think he has the capacity to discern if the Facebook news feed was a net positive for society

Finnucane• 2 years ago

"I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. "

" Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"

hiAndrewQuinn• 2 years ago

Huh. I finally have a name for what my own job really is.

I should probably look into this Palantir operation.

master_crab2• 2 years ago

For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it.

Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both).

The amount of manual labor doesn’t justify its market price, but because governments rarely change their vendors, there is significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their market cap.

nxobject4• 2 years ago

I imagine back in the LBJ and Nixon days IBM would've been doing similar classified work.

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers

Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. Nothing like Oracle or SAP consultants.

master_crab2• 2 years ago

Touché

throwup238• 2 years ago

Do they dig latrines too?

“Forward deployed” sounds like they’re in a FOB out in the sticks somewhere.

okino• 2 years ago

Leaving this here for people interested in what the software actually is.

https://www.palantir.com/docs/

Taikonerd• 2 years ago

But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.

JumpCrisscross3• 2 years ago

they have 80% margin, according to the article

I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the transaction orientation makes the division of labour a little more sensible.)

Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than Bain et al. Few in their generation dreamed of graduating college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a tech company, now that's sexy.

More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct costs" [2].)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...

kidros• 2 years ago

This is such a hilarious oversimplification.

itsoktocry2• 2 years ago

inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning

Getting clean data seems like a universal need, but the job is still difficult, under-appreciated and underpaid. How come?

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Grafana is a better approximation. I used to say back in the day that Peter Thiel complains about no flying cars but is making a data ingesting platform with a Chart Js frontend.

BlueTemplar4• 2 years ago

And yet at the same time I can totally see how it would feel like science fiction to a cop :

https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/

(And a very different kind of science fiction for a non-cop.)

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

Palantir is neck-deep in Ukraine: https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/

From what I understand, their software is also responsible for deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through Russian terrain.

bdjsiqoocwk2• 2 years ago

I'd be curious to understand what speciality they have that they can do drone path planning better...?

thimkerbell2• 2 years ago

I very much liked this essay, and the HN comments are clarifying too. Recommended.

aduffy2• 2 years ago

This is the most Tyler Cowen-coded response I could imagine, and I mean this in the best way possible.

sien2• 2 years ago

But what is the Straussian interpretation of your comment?

km1443• 2 years ago

The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers.

This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.

mydriasis• 2 years ago

Nothing worse than sniffing each-other's farts when we're already working hard. Eek. I'd prefer levity any day.

ants_everywhere• 2 years ago

In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for having the opinions they already had.

bschne• 2 years ago

I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal consulting engagement — we're not really talking developing foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about e.g. places like Jane Street.

km1443• 2 years ago

I agree with you if we're just talking about the people who work somewhere. I would say that the founders I'm referring to certainly at least partially delude themselves into believing that their intellectual prowess encompasses other realms of science, philosophy, engineering, etc. when all they did was create some software. I also do not believe for one second that these founders are actually as interesting as people have mythologized them to be.

mmooss• 2 years ago

The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane.

It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with (texts of) ancient philosophers.

Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly had much to say about that.

gen2204• 2 years ago

When you onboard at meta (circa 2020) the execs like to make vague references to this rare out of print book on media studies that they say presaged everything and explains a lot about how they think about their role in the media ecosystem. They liked to lift quotes from it to justify certain decisions or whatever. They encouraged you to buy the book “if you could find a copy”.

I like reading old books and philosophy so I found a copy. It was basically completely unfollow-able, and at best tangentially related to anything they were doing.

I think having some biblical text to appeal to, in order to justify what is otherwise completely self-dealing, self-serving behavior is some foundational principle of the VP lizard school in Silicon Valley.

It’s a sleight of hand. People will come up with brilliant illusions to distract you from the convenient hand that’s wrist deep into your coin purse.

Not to say there aren’t interesting or valuable intellectual ideas in these books — in Girard, or what have you. But ultimately you have to judge people objectively on the sort of behaviors they exhibit, not on the “illusions” of the intellectual or philosophical explanations they give for those behaviors.

moolcool5• 2 years ago

What was the book?

km1443• 2 years ago

That's fascinating, and yeah it's just the kind of thing I was thinking of—the concrete example is nice. There is indeed something quite perverse about the fusion of philosophy and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism in the information age.

I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doing in the world so they grasp for something more esoteric and hold that up as guiding principles.

If they were actually doing something good, they wouldn't have to find a book that explains why what they're doing is good in some indirect way. If you look at Jimmy Wales' guiding philosophy, for example, it is clearly and directly correlated to the work being done at Wikipedia. There's no jumping through hoops, because most people agree that Wikipedia is a good thing.

Any idea what the book was?

wg02• 2 years ago

TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product.

Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.

nickff• 2 years ago

Seems like an application of "do things that don't scale".

https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

maeil3• 2 years ago

It's funny to read this. The reality is the opposite - Palantir pushes the custoner all day to go with actual operational usecases (i.e. CRUD, not R) and oftentimes some highlevel exec says no, I just want my reports.

Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the rewards.

It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g. worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the gov side of things.

mind-blight• 2 years ago

Yeah, I was there from 2013-2016. I got to use a few of the products that would eventually turn into Foundary. I've actually hung out with the author a couple of times (I was on the AirBus deployment as well as in the building right next to the healthcare team for a while, though we didn't actually interact on any deployments).

Going for operation use cases was a huge win. Once novel data existed in the system (rather than just transforms of existing data), it became a lot harder to rip out. That could be as simple as having someone merge records so you know that two companies are actually the same.

Foundry was a really interesting case because it was basically an enterprise ETL platform before those became very popular + a team of people who helped you get data into it. One of the genius things about the business model was that it operated like a consultancy, but built contracts like a product company. That allowed them to charge based on the value provided rather than hours worked, then pull the best lessons from the deployment back into the main product.

csomar2• 2 years ago

Essentially their competitive advantage is having access to these companies. You can't just show up at Airbus and propose to build them a system for their data flows. Palantir does that and charges multiples of the market rate.

fijiaarone4• 2 years ago

If you want to pick winners, look for companies that hire connected companies.

In hindsight, the fact that Palatir went to Airbus meant that the fix was in and it was already decided that Boeing was going down. Or for the less cynical, it was Palantir's magic that made Airbus successful and if Boeing were competent they would have hired Palantir.

kayo_20211030• 2 years ago

I loved the comment about Airbus

“Asana, but for building planes”.

Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?

workflowing• 2 years ago

Smartsheet.

huqedato• 2 years ago

I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business. I'll give it a pass.

ak_111• 2 years ago

Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance.

from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f...

""" Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza.

It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in "crucial operations in Israel".

Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”.

These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """

mulcahey• 2 years ago

The war in Gaza is a moral gray area

pphysch3• 2 years ago

To what extent is repeated mass-murder of civilians, total destruction of healthcare and education systems, etc. part of the "moral gray area"? That's just not a serious argument.

You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist values and so on.

kevinventullo• 2 years ago

Them and every American taxpayer

monkaiju2• 2 years ago

Pretty obvious difference between choosing to work towards the goals of a genocide and being threatened to pay taxes or have your property and wages seized...

slibhb• 2 years ago

Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

That there's a genocide in Gaza is objectively debatable. In the sense that people debate it.

pimpampum• 2 years ago

This, but the author betrays itself once it says he's fine with the clear pro-western stance. As a politically informed person coming from the global south, I cannot but denounce western colonialism that lives on up to today.

nova220332• 2 years ago

Not only did it provide information to the US military

Palantir can not provide information. They can give you insights into your data. They're like splunk..and equally expensive.

xrd• 2 years ago

As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them.

But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.

bdjsiqoocwk2• 2 years ago

It's very powerful

If you bought that garbage I have some ice to sell you.

vundercind5• 2 years ago

I found TFA to frequently juke in weird directions, and for the text to at times be at-odds with what I believed the subtext of what I had just read—a notable early one is where the author describes the intellectual atmosphere at the company in a series of examples that definitely read to me like performative, LARPing intellectualism… then sums that up by claiming you can’t copy their vibe by LARPing intellectualism, which is what I though I was just reading a description of.

The selection of the list of people and the reason they were being mentioned, in the section you’re referring to, was another point where the piece threw me.

I wouldn’t say it changed my mind about the company, but it, uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.

Cloud98• 2 years ago

This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating the world, but it's unable to digest the data and use it effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving hard engineering problems.

bongodongobob2• 2 years ago

Palantir was working on my companies data for months getting ready to show us what AI could do for us. Internally I was asking "what could they possibly show us that we don't already know, even theoretically?" No one really had any idea either, but we were skeptically optimistic. Palantir said just wait, this AI shit is amazing and we'll have so many new insights for you.

The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the big presentation. I wasn't there, but from what I heard, it was basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type reports outlining information that we already had/knew. They were literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short. It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from what I heard it was hilarious.

ninetyninenine2• 2 years ago

I agree, the business use case was zero. Was it impressive though?

In the sense that Palantir found out information that you guys already knew... but how much time did it take? How much man power and how much money? What is that compared to the resources your company spent to build that internal knowledge?

Also what company was it if you feel comfortable revealing?

bongodongobob2• 2 years ago

It was nothing more than a handful of interns couldn't come up with in the same amount of time. Along the way they just asked obvious questions about how we used and wanted to see our data. There wasn't any magic, there was nothing new. We can make our own reports. We were told they were going to find new insights, there weren't any.

asdasdsddd2• 2 years ago

I worked there in the weird era. A couple things.

1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things.

2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different from typical sv talent.

3. The services -> product transition was cool, I didn't weigh it as much as should've, but I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd

4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it's impossible to figure out who you actually needed to talk to.

avmich• 2 years ago

It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow.

Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-...

"Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements.

Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."

saturn86018• 2 years ago

Man his speaking and writing style get so annoying after a while and I speak as someone who has seen him talk at DEFCON and HOPE multiple times. He has got this god like reputation among the hacker community. Might there be someone who isn't as attention seeking and who isn't just trying to make catchy speeches talking about the same ideas?

asdasdsddd2• 2 years ago

as I said, ICE is not even close to the spiciest thing it worked on

serguzest• 2 years ago

I think things are getting worse, JD Vance is Peter Thiel's high-rank implant to possible upcoming Trump administration.

Will evil techno-cons replace neocons?

okasaki• 2 years ago

Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."

And don't forget the UK National Health Service

andsoitis2• 2 years ago

Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."

ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim.

Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial government's removal of the French Catholic Acadian population, the Amhara security forces treatment of Tigrayans in Ethiopia, and of course the one that its perpetrators euphemistically called the Final Solution.

How, exactly, is ICE doing anything remotely like this? If it were true, surely it would be in the headlines and surely people would protest it harder than what is happening elsewhere in the world today?

worstspotgain• 2 years ago

Let's hypothesize that a would-be administration in a Western country would like to accomplish full Russian-style autocracy relatively quickly. Let's say they have stated publicly that their plan is to go after immigrants first, opposition leaders second. Numerically, these are two small categories, relatively speaking.

The first question is, what about the third and fourth categories? Would they be dissenters in general, or specific kinds (judged to be riskier for the autocratization process) and which?

The second question is, how would they go about identifying them? Are there products and services at Palantir that may have been designed for this goal?

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

This:

    > I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd

Sorry, my English is a bit weak. What is the meaning here? Did you buy shares post-IPO?

reshlo2• 2 years ago

FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out.

1oooqooq4• 2 years ago

he invested into the company (that is, funded the immoral work he was disgusted by and caused him to leave) by paying them for stock options while (or shortly after) working there.

kome4• 2 years ago

"1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things."

please tell us something

rob74• 2 years ago

The strangest thing for me were the article's first two paragraphs:

Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.

[...] During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office.

I don't really see the contradiction here? The most morally repugnant companies are often the most profitable, and the stock market sometimes (not always) follows suit. And if the protests outside their offices have decreased, that's probably just a sign that there are other things to protest against now...

1oooqooq4• 2 years ago

when you can profit from something all rules are off.

your 401k is probably funding cocacola extract water from impoverished communities and then selling it back to them with sugar.

orochimaaru4• 2 years ago

Why are they considered more morally repugnant than big tech or telcos. All these share data with the government. Palantir just provides the software by the way - based on the palantir installation where I work. They don’t share data. The software is installed on my companies infra - not on palantir.

trenchgun2• 2 years ago

This wad also a great read on Palantir, from 2020: https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/

ks20482• 2 years ago

The age old tale of “libertarians” getting filthy rich on taxpayer dollars.

jongjong• 2 years ago

That's the story of the entire big tech sector and they can't deny it.

If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need a monetary system based on unlimited money creation.

It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the globe attract the 'right' candidates.

EFreethought• 2 years ago

This is even better than that: "Libertarians" getting rich on government contracts to run surveillance for governments.

whaaaaat• 2 years ago

During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.

I mean, it is those things. I think just because it's listed on a market doesn't change those things. People are just like, "I value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have about what Palantir is".

aidenn0• 2 years ago

Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn’t work, or a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to implement a payroll system that - again - doesn’t work, you are seeing politics beat substance.

Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far from your expertise, and if it's close to your expertise, you wouldn't be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is something that hasn't been done this generation, they get bent over a barrel by the contractors.

TL; DR: when people who can't write software hire other people to write software for them, what non-political signal do they have to separate the sheep from the goats?

fnikacevic• 2 years ago

Hire internal software folks who can judge the signals better?

knowaveragejoe• 2 years ago

This is what the USDS is slowly but surely accomplishing. It's just a hell of a beast to tackle.

fijiaarone4• 2 years ago

Now that the surveillance state has won, people want to be on the winning side.

kome4• 2 years ago

true, and disgusting.

anshulbhide2• 2 years ago

This is the first article on Palantir I've found that's refreshing in its candour and actually exposes why its a such a success.

Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services companies.

smolder• 2 years ago

Peter Theil is scum. People who work for him are also scum. Evil has the ropes of society because evil worked harder at getting them and didn't learn the lesson about sharing in kindergarten.

anshulbhide2• 2 years ago

As someone who runs an IT services company, I can tell you how uncommon it is to find engineers who can both code really well, but also interact and sell to customers.

I always wondered why you needed BD / "business folk", but its rare to find the ability to schmooze with customers and hustle along with deep technical talent in the same individual.

So really surprising (and cool) to see how Palantir was able to do this with their FDEs!

austinjp• 2 years ago

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt.

We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.

dan-robertson• 2 years ago

Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.

kome4• 2 years ago

he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".

Aeolun7• 2 years ago

I sure don’t have any more glamorous reasons to work for the company I do.

They pay well, and that’s where the interest ends. There’s a lot of challenges in gluing CRUD together at a large enough scale, but it’s not exactly valuable to the greater world.

curtisblaine• 2 years ago

Maybe OP was aware of Palantir's impact on the world and was ethically OK with it. Ethics are nuanced, an by all means not universal.

maxehmookau• 2 years ago

We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum.

I think this is important, especially in tech. Our contributions often change the world, even in little ways, but this compounds.

clircle• 2 years ago

We need to teach our students...

Teach your values to your own kids, man

cambaceres2• 2 years ago

The perfect response to this kind of preaching.

Certhas• 2 years ago

Students are adults. Teaching them that their choices have systemic consequences is not the same as forcing values on them. It might be factually incorrect, but it's not a value statement.

And I have no worries that the billionaires will make sure their views and values are aired and widely known, so students will be very much able to make up their own mind.

moolcool5• 2 years ago

Most Computer Science and engineering curriculums include courses about professional ethics.

throwaway19972• 2 years ago

Pretty much every dysfunction of this society can be traced back to this attitude. Social responsibility to other people beyond your own kin is necessary to produce a society worth living in. This necessarily includes taking up the burden of teaching you the values your parents refused to teach you.

yoaviram• 2 years ago

What a brilliant example of self-righteous post-rationalization. Maybe we all need to recalibrate our moral compasses. Yes, ethics is nuanced, but not in the case of Palantir, who directly enables the abuse of human rights on a massive scale. They are not in the grey, they are pitch black - arms dealers selling to the highest bidder[1][2]. Same as NSO but with better PR.

The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way.

1. https://archive.ph/LwvMA 2. https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/

kettleballroll2• 2 years ago

I'm sorry, but I fail to see how your sources are relevant. [1] is written by a science fiction author, and while it outlines how palantir is trying to get into a contract with the NHS (apparently mostly by acquiring companies that already have such contracts), it doesn't say _anything_ about what palantir did (or has planned to do) that would be detrimental to the NHS. [2] merely speculated how palantir might help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. Which... Uhh... I don't see as a bad thing?

elefanten• 2 years ago

This is a pretty wild claim, you're gonna need better evidence than strident rhetorical posturing to back that one up.

andsoitis2• 2 years ago

The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger.

That seems like a very uncharitable take. For instance, don't you think the section on morality[1] addresses this head on?

[1] https://nabeelqu.substack.com/i/150188028/morality

pell• 2 years ago

This section is definitely interesting to read but also leaves me a bit hungry for the supposed intellectual "intensity" earlier paragraphs promised about the company and its (ex) employees. The model proposed for thinking about the morality here is incredibly limited.

whack2• 2 years ago

The guy spends an entire section talking about this. Just because he has different moral opinions doesn't mean he doesn't care about morality. To quote the author:

Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on.

Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things and basically fall into category 1. You can also go work on category 2 things like GiveDirectly or OpenPhilanthropy or whatever.

The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with.

But it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out?

I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus:

On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations).

They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well.

I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.

This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere.

The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions. I’m betting the people who stopped the terror attacks feel good about theirs, too. Or the people who distributed medicines during the pandemic.

Even though the tide has shifted and working on these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example – many people are uncomfortable with some of the consequences of deploying AI. Maybe AI gets used for hacking; maybe deepfakes make the world worse in all these ways; maybe it causes job losses. But there are also major benefits to AI (Dario Amodei articulates some of these well in a recent essay).

As with Palantir, working on AI probably isn’t 100% morally good, nor is it 100% evil. Not engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance. Even if you don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic, if you’re someone who could plausibly work in AI-related issues, you probably want to do so in some way. There are easy cases: build evals, work on alignment, work on societal resilience. But my claim here is that the grey area is worth engaging in too: work on government AI policy. Deploy AI into areas like healthcare. Sure, it’ll be difficult. Plunge in.8

When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.

thisisnotauser• 2 years ago

I love this discussion, and I think it's critically important for people to engage with it.

However, I cannot more strongly disagree with your implicit assumption of innocence for "category 1." Facebook alone is unquestionably more harmful than Palatir, and any purely for profit entity is by necessity intentionally unanchored to any ethical foundation at all. Facebook is known for explicitly supporting genocidal regimes abroad, and for intentionally ignoring white supremacy, child abuse and domestic terrorism here in the US, all while being very explicit about not cooperating with the government agencies responsible for combatting these issues.

To that end, I would extend your thesis to the effect that people who eschew category 3 for category 1 aren't simply abdicating social responsibility, but are hypocritically engaged in substantially more socially harmful behaviors.

Sure, Palatir leads to people dying, and sometimes those people are innocent bystanders, but those actions are the result of any engagement with the public sector. Facebook is a direct progenitor of genocide abroad and fascism stateside, and is wholly untethered from either conscience or consequence. Category 1 is worse.

cambaceres2• 2 years ago

Certain situations that are likely to occur in professional settings would be suitable topics for university education. For example, doctors will encounter many challenging decisions where it's crucial to understand what past generations of medical professionals have learned from similar situations.

However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. Who would have the authority to decide which businesses are more ethical? Some argue that working in the defense industry is the least ethical career choice, while others claim it would be immoral not to support a country's right to purchase weapons for self-defense. These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.

crabbone2• 2 years ago

Ethics study is rarely about what decision to make, but mostly about how to make a decision. So, there's no problem with teaching ethics in the presence of defense industry.

Similarly, doctors learn medical ethics, and, of course, not every question has the "right" answer. Partially, medical (and research) ethics are about knowing what constitutes malpractice under current law, but it's also about some more general ideas (on which the law might be based) that are hard to quantify. Here's one example: during a drug research, if the interim results show that the newly suggested treatment is unambiguously better than the one given to the control group, the researcher is compelled to stop the research and just move everyone to the new drug. But, the reality is rarely so clear-cut. The researcher might not be confident in the accuracy of the intermediate results. While the average success from a particular treatment might improve, it might also worsen the situation for some outliers in the target group etc. All this would lead the researcher to the situation where they need to select between continuing and stopping the research with no clear best choice.

asoneth2• 2 years ago

These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.

When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.

gravitronic• 2 years ago

In 2012 I was at a conference in Montreal for CS students that had Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard, bed bug registry) do the closing talk, and he was giving advice to students about what to work on. He said it out loud, "or if you want to work for evil go into the hallway and talk to the Palentir booth". It was a great moment of one man speaking truth to power in a packed room of their target audience.

immibis• 2 years ago

Each individual has to balance between working for the corrupt system in order to extract benefits from it (otherwise the system simply kills you through starvation), and working in ways that benefit society even though the system punishes them for it. The best individual outcome results from working with the system at all times, so the problem will never be solved.

mentalgear• 2 years ago

In Section 6, the author attempts to assess Palantir's moral standing, but the chosen categories—"neutral/good/gray"—reflect a biased framework. A more objective classification, like "neutral/good/bad," would have been more appropriate. This subtle shift raises questions about the methodology used to evaluate the company's ethical impact.

The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.

lccerina2• 2 years ago

They are "difficult/thorny" questions only if you want them to be like that. "Health insurance companies make difficult decisions all the time" a.k.a. do we screw up our clients manually or through AI?

robertkoss3• 2 years ago

It is crazy how much misinformation is being spread here.

1. Palantir does more than government work. They have 3 core products:

- Gotham fka PG, used by government agencies for Intel and Mission Planning. Used to extract information from unstructured data, geographical analysis and much more. Just look up Meta Constellation

- Foundry, their commercial big data product, kind of comparable to Databricks or MS Fabric, but much more capable. You can build no code applications on top of your semantic layer (ontology) and even write back to the source systems (ERP).

- Apollo, their deployment product. Haven't used it and I don't know if they are really selling it or just advertising. They are using it internally very heavily though.

2. Palantirs commercial products are not a secret. There are tons of videos out there, the docs are public, you can even sign up for Foundry and use it immediately.

3. Palantirs commercial side of business is bigger than its governmental today.

4. Foundry is NOT "basically Grafana". As I said before, just watch some videos

egorfine• 2 years ago

This is an unexpectedly excellent article and incredibly well written.

lccerina2• 2 years ago

"Very intense people" -> Borderline evil sociopaths. "Things in category 3 needs to exist" mmmmh no, and reading from a "philosophy grad, rationalist heavy" that those are "morally thorny" questions tells me that he should have studied something else...

vfclists• 2 years ago

Whats it with yellow fonts on a white background?

Thank God for reader mode.

guappa2• 2 years ago

Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. (Apparently there are cognitive benefits to this.)

Ah, now believing to pseudoscience is a sign of great intelligence?

JCM9• 2 years ago

Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like than amazing tech. In my observations they could do some interesting things with data but there was no real secret sauce to dealing with the usual messyness of real world data beyond just deploying manual labor to sort it out and then do interesting, but ultimately pedestrian, analysis.

Struck me as not that different from many other consulting type engagements: It’s not something a company couldn’t just do on their own if they wanted but companies just choose to pay someone else to do a bunch of grunt work under the guise of some hand-wavy special expertise and IP.

mandevil2• 2 years ago

It would be hard for, to pick a random large company like Coca-Cola, to hire a whole bunch of top school CS grads. Their IT team will always be less attractive as a job than working at a company whose whole focus is IT, and so giving the choice, people will prefer to work at a company that makes computer programming its central focus, and pays better than Coca Cola does, and gives them more freedom than Coca Cola does. This is the whole "be a profit center, not a cost center" issue in the corporate world (1). So it would actually be hard for someone like Coca Cola to build a team similar to one that Palantir can provide. This is also how McKinsey etc. work: a top Harvard Business School graduate doesn't want to get hired by Signet Jewelers, selling retail jewelry in shopping malls, but if they get hired by McKinsey to work on the Signet Jewelers contract then everyone is happy.

1: For Coca Cola paying salaries for computer people is a cost that gets in the way of their real business of selling beverages; for someone like Palantir having good computer people produces profit, that is the real business. This is always going to trickle down to the work conditions, pay, etc.

spicebox• 2 years ago

Matt Levine has talked about how this is how PE firms work too. No Harvard MBA wants to work for a midsize manufacturing firm, but they’d kill to work for a PE firm that going to make them work for their PortCo that’s a midsize manufacturer (but they get to say they work for Apollo)

anonu• 2 years ago

Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like Accenture on steroids

danw1979• 2 years ago

These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun. This, it turned out, was an inheritance from the Paypal mafia.

Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.

mandmandam• 2 years ago

100 mile bike rides are awesome. So is reading philosophy. Competition can be fun and motivating. Experimenting with weird diets can be fantastic exploration.

Fuck Palantir. Not because sometimes they act like human beings, but because sometimes they don't.

The worst attitude fta by far was the "Well at least we're at the table" justification. Weak rationalization presented as rationality; a thin veneer over "might makes right". "Gray areas" - yeah okay buddy.

AnarchismIsCool• 2 years ago

I think you've hit the rationalist nail on the head. They look thoughtful and intellectually honest but in reality they're just kit bashing philosophy to paper over absolutely insane biases and political positions. You don't see any of them espousing leftist/egalitarian views, they're always sitting around thinking "this ethnic cleansing makes me feel good, how can I justify my participation?"

skipants2• 2 years ago

Eh, maybe. I wouldn't completely judge a workplace by these people. I've kind of come around to enjoy working with "weirdos" like this because their personal quirks have no actual affect on how they work. It can make them more interesting if anything.

I think the actual awful part of people like that are when they get in a position of power and preach their weirdness as The One True Way(tm). Which, unfortunately, a lot of them do. I think this stems from them having success in life without realizing it's selection bias. The result is that their own decisions are biased towards their quirks and they become pretty insufferable about it.

But, to your point and to completely contradict mine, I would bet those "One True Way" people probably are the norm at Palantir, judging by the onboarding book choices.

kettleballroll2• 2 years ago

Are the book choices bad? I looked them up after first hearing about them through this article, and at least the Interviewing Users one sounded useful, and Principles seems to have a ton of good reviews. For the uninformed like me, could you give some color to those books?

nova220332• 2 years ago

the company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow,

Peter Thiel, supporter of Donald Trump....supporter of civil liberties, I'm sure...

beedeebeedee• 2 years ago

I'm amazed there's no discussion in the article about Palantir's role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and "Where's Daddy". That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.

pms• 2 years ago

That's the kind of products Palantir develops, but is it confirmed that they developed Lavender and "Where's Daddy"?

wormlord• 2 years ago

Incredible cope.

will-burner• 2 years ago

This is a well written article with some good tie bits and lots of links. The author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about Palantir, why Palantir is successful, and what makes a good employee at Palantir. As a Palantir skeptic, it made me more interested in the company, and aside from that there were some good learning resources linked in the article like books and other blog articles.

At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things.

I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.

omega3• 2 years ago

Sounds like a modern version of an consultancy company but with a significant focus on data rather than business processes.

blueyes• 2 years ago

I have been directly involved in deals involving Palantir and I can say that their sales force, at least in Europe, is sociopathic. They play very dirty, both with their customers and amongst themselves. On top of that, I'm not particularly impressed with their software, which they charge way too much money for. It's data aggregation and visualization, gimme a break.

LZ_Khan• 2 years ago

Wow, this is a great article. I had no idea what Palantir did these past 10 years, but after reading this article I can say they had amazing direction.

cavisne• 2 years ago

“ This ended up helping to drive the A350 manufacturing surge and successfully 4x’ing the pace of manufacturing while keeping Airbus’s high standards of quality.” come on…

robertkoss3• 2 years ago

Airbus themselves are claiming that.

notaword• 2 years ago

Is HackerNews losing it's cynical touch?

To me, the purpose of a 'flat hierarchy' and this internal 'status game' are obvious - clandestine operation.

* Lots of projects, most of them 'clean'

* Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg?

* It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you're doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks. Work at Palantir and you're soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there's plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn't you know it all the data you could ever want.

* All this talk about:

Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games.

Why is 'social context' so unusually important? Your customers can't actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

int_19h2• 2 years ago

During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular.

Is that really any different in 2024?

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

lol no, it's worse... now they're building autopilot for military drones

evrydayhustling• 2 years ago

Well written essay! I fell into a rabbit hole around his quote "context is that which is scarce".

After squinting at the linked Tyler Cowen essay, I think it's a convoluted way of saying "context is valuable and a lot of times when things suck it's because there's not enough of it". I was hoping he was going to give an operational definition of context. Does anyone have a more developed take?

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/co...

nonameiguess3• 2 years ago

So I haven't read Marginal Revolution or followed Tyler Cowen consistently for probably 15 years, so take my word for what it's worth, but as far as I can tell, he's just referring here to prerequisite knowledge, other information you have to have ingested and understood before you're going to have any real hope of understanding something else. "That which is scarce" is not itself a definition. Lots of things are scarce and most of them are not context. He seems to be using that phrase to indicate that context is scarce in a lot of readers and consumers and this harms their ability to understand anything.

Given the mileiu we find ourselves in on the web, this is probably hard to avoid. We're deluged with information nonstop, typically in fairly shallow small bites, often from sources with very limited and biased points of view. Doing a true deep dive to understand background and context before forming any sort of conclusion of your own is difficult, time-consuming, and contrary to human instinct, because we want to participate, and if we don't have an opinion, we feel like we can't, or at bare minimum, saying that surely won't put you at the top of an upvote-based sorting scheme.

Take this very thread. I'd heard of Palantir in the sense of hearing the name, knowing where that names comes from, and knowing it is associated with Peter Thiel. That's about all I knew of it before right now. After reading this blog and all the comments, what do I know now? A little bit more. My prior on them being part of an explicit and intentional conspiracy to abet genocide and prepare the population for an eventual authoritarian takeover in which regular people are getting jailed left and right for buying Plan B and what not is low, so I guess I tend to dismiss speculation like that. They seem to make a product for synthesizing data from sources that don't have compatible schemas and seemingly no APIs for common-format export. That was largely just manual work at first, maybe still is, but they've tried to make a product of it. Some commenters are saying it is snake oil. Some are saying it's amazing and useful. My takeaway from that is they are trying to solve a very hard problem and sometimes what they do works and sometimes it doesn't. They seemingly take on customers that are political hot potatoes and not popular with the stereotype demographic of a silicon valley workforce, more typical of the customers you'd usually see taken on by a Raytheon or Lockheed.

I guess I'm supposed to have an opinion beyond that. I don't know. My brother-in-law works for Anduril and has spent most of his time the past three years deployed to theaters of combat teaching soldiers to use drones. My wife works for Raytheon on a spy satellite orchestration that is literally named Cyberdyne and would almost certainly be considered dystopian by any average person on Hacker News that heard about it and didn't have the context of working on it for two decades. I don't believe they're evil. I was an Army officer commanding tank units in Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't believe I'm evil.

I'm not sure how people think we're supposed to approach subjects like this. We're going to have international conflicts and laws. They're both a part of civilization. Given that, it seems somewhat inevitable and reasonable that countries will also have military and law enforcement agencies. Balancing action with inaction, false positives with false negatives, is impossible to get right all of the time, but what is the takeaway? Should all humans everywhere refuse to work for any military or law enforcement agency? Should all businesses refuse to sell to them? Wouldn't that mean we effectively have no defense and no laws? Where is the line between acknowledging that sometimes even your own country is guilty of atrocities and overreach and simply throwing up your hands and saying we should build no weapons and have no sort of intelligence gathering activities of any kind?

I don't buy that the US or Israel is uniquely evil here and seemingly neither is Palantir simply for doing business with ICE and the IDF. I'm obviously motivated to believe that, but again, surely there is some spectrum, isn't there? If we look at say, the 20th century histories of France and Germany, there are no saints. France was an imperial power that did a lot of bad shit in Africa. They gassed protesters and have had some obvious law enforcement brutalities. But they didn't commit a holocaust and try to conquer all of Europe. I guess that's a low bar to clear, but still, should no one ever sell anything to the French military? The German military? Doesn't that again mean they wouldn't have militaries? If neither European powers nor the US had militaries, then seemingly all of Europe would currently be Soviet republics. That is surely not better than where we actually find ourselves, even if where we find ourselves isn't the best we can do.

TriangleEdge• 2 years ago

I worked as an FDE for govt deployments. I am writing this as a warning to others. I got drugged without consent, _twice_, while working for Palantir. Palantir sells software to demons, so take my warning as you will. The first time was minor, but the second time was major, and I'm still hurt from it.

who-shot-jr• 2 years ago

Fantastic read!

siliconc0w• 2 years ago

IMO it is inevitable that this technology will be turned against Americans if it hasn't already been. I'm sure they do some good but a large part of their value is an socio-political arbitrage where they're allowed to do things that would be absolutely unpalatable for the government to do directly.

oglop• 2 years ago

Lame. Sounds like a bunch of douchebags that would be into Jordan Peterson or some other lame ass new age bullshit.

yencabulator• 2 years ago

the company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow

As a response to violations of civil liberties? More like a major mechanism for.

Reflections on Palantir

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