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NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

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Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#81

Post by givemeethekeys »

TriangleEdge wrote: post #7

Pre IPO ex Palantir here. Palantir will do a number of things to gain influence. They'll find out who are the decision makers on the space they want a contract, and they'll target them specifically. For example: if they know you take the train to work every morning, and read the news paper, they'll take a full page advertisement on the paper they know you like and that you'll see. They gain this information by, you g…

This is not something new. A good enterprise sales team does the same thing: they learn about the organization, the gatekeepers, the decision makers, how to get past / around the gatekeepers to reach the decision makers, and finally convince the decision makers that they are the best solution. The more information the sales team is able to collect / gather / learn about each person they'll be interacting with, the better chance they'll have of getting them to say, "yes".

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#82

Post by jjulius »

KittenInABox wrote: post #65
morelisp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBTI is a pseudoscience, not a magic spell to "execute a rhetorical strategy" - or again, as a homo sapiens might call it, "talk to".

I agree it's pseudoscience. But trying to psychologically profile your mark before talking to someone is still weird and creepy. This is far more than seeing if a chick is receptive to being picked up at a bar on a Friday night. It's seeing her at a happy hour a week earlier and then planning for the rest of the week all the strategies to get her to go home with you on Friday, including stalking her social media, fol…

This is tangential, but I would highly recommend watching a show called The Rehearsal, if you haven't already. It's basically exactly what you just wrote, and wholly unsettling yet brilliant.

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#83

Post by lmeyerov »

c1b wrote: post #71
ghc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know (in as much detail as you are allowed) what you feel the strengths and weaknesses of CHEETAS is.

I cannot comment specifically on CHEETAS, but what I can say is that USG developing in house software solutions almost always produces a disastrous product that goes over budget and has extreme maintenance overhead. To see why, you can simply ask yourself: do you think that the unelected officials overseeing government agencies that embark on enterprise software development projects have sufficient expertise and ente…

Interesting, thank you for sharing!

That experience speaks more to the perils of in-housing, not to why Palantir is the best COTS for specific needs here. Are there specific leading COTS here you view it so far ahead of for such a contract?

Closer to our own practice.. Modern LLMs have basically reset the field for SOTA in this space, with Palantir, by definition, being behind OpenAI in the most basic tasks, and thus being in the same race as everyone else to retool. Speaking from our own USG experience, we are deep tech leads in some other intelligence areas (graph, ...), and before OpenAI, often chose to adopt prev-gen leading LLM models (BERT, ...) for tasks closer to the NLP side as we recognized that wasn't where our deep tech had an inhouse advantage. We basically had to start over on some of those projects there as soon as GPT4 came out because it just changed so much that the incumbent advantages of already being delivering on a contract were a dead end for core functionality, and almost a year later, it's now obvious that it was the right choice when we get compared to companies that haven't been. Palantir has been publicly resetting as well for using GenAI era tech, which suggests the same situation.

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#84

Post by 0xy »

blue_cookeh wrote: post #66
cedws wrote: post #6

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

> Ideally the NHS would just build it in house, but sadly it's a slow and bloated organisation unable to innovate (as most government managed things usually become). This is patently false, a narrative often parroted by people who don't understand or have never worked in the NHS. There are many intelligent people in technical/digital roles in the NHS that innovate on a daily basis - heck, many build systems internall…

Given the NHS' costs continue to explode, and most of the cash goes straight to padding middle management, it seems easy to see that it's a slow and bloated organization.

After all, the UK's health spending is increasing at a rate 2,000% higher than close neighbor France's is -- indicating massive fraud and waste.

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#85

Post by asdadsdad »

cedws wrote: post #6

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

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

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#86

Post by 0xy »

dwroberts wrote: post #51
cedws wrote: post #6

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

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

They've been in power for a long time and yet NHS spending increases are 2,000% higher than France's equivalent health spending.

Can you explain how someone can "hate the NHS" while drowning them in cash far beyond what they need to operate?

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#87

Post by dwroberts »

0xy wrote: post #86
dwroberts wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They've been in power for a long time and yet NHS spending increases are 2,000% higher than France's equivalent health spending. Can you explain how someone can "hate the NHS" while drowning them in cash far beyond what they need to operate?

> Can you explain how someone can "hate the NHS" while drowning them in cash far beyond what they need to operate?

Drowning them in cash that they have siphoned off to their own cronies and companies that give their MPs kickbacks.

Not unlike this Palantir contract, which is probably going to be Greensill II

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#88

Post by numpad0 »

cedws wrote: post #6

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

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

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#89

Post by neilv »

mdhb wrote: post #73
neilv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a good filter for culture: discourage the people who wouldn't be onboard with company approaches, and simultaneously attract the people who want to be a part of the power that the company just flexed a tiny bit.

I imagine after thinking about it for more than thirty seconds some rather obvious problems begin to emerge with this approach.

What's an example problem?

(Something about building a company of power-seeking people who don't notice, or aren't bothered by, ethical questionability? Some companies have herded those well enough, and thrived for decades, like that.)

Re: NHS to investigate Palantir influencer campaign as possible contract breach

#90

Post by redcobra762 »

p_j_w wrote: post #42
redcobra762 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “state level powers” even mean? And they’re hardly “opaque”, at least not any more than any other publicly traded company is, and held to similar account. What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do? I wonder if you’re falling for a lot of the marketing hype…

> they’re hardly “opaque”, at least not any more than any other publicly traded company is Publicly traded companies are required to report certain financial facts about the company, but they’re still extremely opaque.

Yes, as a publicly traded company, but not especially so amongst those.
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