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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

#101

Post by 0xy »

Terr_ wrote: post #98
0xy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That " increasing at a rate" vague phrasing makes me instinctively suspicious of abused statistics. For example, suppose in 24 hours France's spending goes up +0% and the UK's spending goes up +0.001%: "Oh my god! The UK's spending is increasing at a rate infinity times more!!11"

The time period was 2010 to 2019. Even since 2019, the NHS has several hundred billion in planned budget increases.

My favorite thing about dysfunctional UK political rhetoric is when someone will say "the Conservatives are slashing the NHS!" when what they really mean is that they've slightly decreased the rate of increase, so by every metric it's still skyrocketing (but not enough to those who want to dump infinite cash in the middle management growth machine).

Another fun factoid: the pro-Brexit crew were chided for claiming they'd increase NHS funding by 350m Euros a week. Since Brexit, NHS funding has actually increased by more than double that.

Nothing can stop the NHS cash burning. Expand middle management at all costs. Nevermind that we're outspending comparable countries with comparable health pressures.

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

#102

Post by cedws »

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…

Why does the NHS have a mismatch of IT systems that don't fit together then? Why are they still running Windows XP?

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

#103

Post by ethanbond »

lmeyerov wrote: post #94
ethanbond wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you don’t know what Palantir is . Nothing OpenAI does is competitive with what Palantir does. Palantir, like every other software company out there, is exploring what “my product + AI” means.

That's a fair surface-level view, but worth thinking through a bit. Palantir is multiple main things, and a whole ton of custom software projects on top, and a good chunk of them rely on the quality of their NLP & vision systems for being competitive with others. My question relates to the notion that they are inherently the best when, by all public AI benchmarks, they don't make the best components and, in the conte…

I mean the topic of this thread is data management. That’s their bread and butter.

It just doesn’t make sense to be having this conversation through the lens of AI.

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

#104

Post by Barrin92 »

redcobra762 wrote: post #96
Barrin92 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What does “state level powers” even mean? In this case espionage and surveillance, traditionally domains of the state. >What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do? They're not subject to privacy legislation and limitations that the police is. There's a concrete exapmle of this, commercial storage of license plate data in the US is largely unregulated,…

Espionage and surveillance is a misrepresentation of what Palintir does; every Fortune 500 company does similar if we use this definition. And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard, just like you or I aren’t held to that standard.

>And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard

That's a strong claim given that Palantir has sold and deployed so called "predictive policing" technology to the police forces of New Orleans[1] (without city council knowledge, so much for the accountability) and even directly advertises itself as a defense company[2]. Their revenue is overwhelmingly contract with national governments, again mostly for police or defense work. That's not how you, I or most Fortune 500 companies do business.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

[2]https://youtu.be/rxKghrZU5w8

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

#105

Post by redcobra762 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #104
redcobra762 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Espionage and surveillance is a misrepresentation of what Palintir does; every Fortune 500 company does similar if we use this definition. And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard, just like you or I aren’t held to that standard.

>And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard That's a strong claim given that Palantir has sold and deployed so called "predictive policing" technology to the police forces of New Orleans[1] (without city council knowledge, so much for the accountability) and even directly advertises itself as a defense company[2]. Their revenue is overwhelmingly contract with national governments, again mo…

It’s in no way a strong claim, as the cleaning services of the New Orleans Police Department are also not police.

And it absolutely is how you, I, and every other employed organization works. You seem to not understand what a contractor is.

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

#106

Post by numpad0 »

ikekkdcjkfke wrote: post #19
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)…

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

Universities as magical R&D powerhouse model don't seem to be working for past few decades indeed...

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

#107

Post by Engineering-MD »

0xy wrote: post #84
blue_cookeh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you have a source to say most of the money goes to middle management? My understanding was management employment numbers and costs have reduced over the last decade, but I’m happy to be shown to be wrong via up to date evidence.

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

#108

Post by lmeyerov »

ethanbond wrote: post #103
lmeyerov wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair surface-level view, but worth thinking through a bit. Palantir is multiple main things, and a whole ton of custom software projects on top, and a good chunk of them rely on the quality of their NLP & vision systems for being competitive with others. My question relates to the notion that they are inherently the best when, by all public AI benchmarks, they don't make the best components and, in the conte…

I mean the topic of this thread is data management. That’s their bread and butter. It just doesn’t make sense to be having this conversation through the lens of AI.

AI leadership seems existential to being a top data management company and providing top data management capabilities:

* Databricks data management innovations, now that basics are in, are half on the AI side, like adding vector & LLM indexing for any data stored in it, moving their data catalog to be LLM-driven, adding genAI interfaces to accessing data stored in it, ...

* Data pipelines spanning ingestion, correction, wrangling, indexing, integration, and feature & model management, and especially of the tricky unstructured text, photo, and video nature, and wide nature of event/log/transaction recordings important to a lot of the government, are all moving or have already moved to AI. Whether it is monitoring video, investigating satellite photos, mining social media & news, entity resolution & linking on documents & logs, linking datasets, or OCR+translation of foreign documents, these are all about the intelligence tier. Tools like ontology management and knowledge graphs are especially being reset due to the ability of modern LLMs to drastically improve their quality and improve their scalability & usability through automation.

* Data protection has long been layering on AI methods for alerting (UEBA, ...), classification, policy synthesis, configuration management, ...

Databricks is a pretty good example of a company here. They don't preconfigure government datasets on the governments behalf and sell that back to them, but we do see architects using it as a way to build their own data platforms, and especially for AI-era workloads. Likewise, they have grown an ecosystem of data management providers on top vs single-sourcing, eg, it's been cool to see Altana bring supply chain data as basically a Databricks implementation. For core parts, Databricks keeps adding more of the data management stack to their system, such as examining how a high-grade entity resolution pipeline would break down between their stack and ecosystem providers.

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

#109

Post by Terr_ »

0xy wrote: post #101
Terr_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That " increasing at a rate" vague phrasing makes me instinctively suspicious of abused statistics. For example, suppose in 24 hours France's spending goes up +0% and the UK's spending goes up +0.001%: "Oh my god! The UK's spending is increasing at a rate infinity times more!!11"

The time period was 2010 to 2019. Even since 2019, the NHS has several hundred billion in planned budget increases. My favorite thing about dysfunctional UK political rhetoric is when someone will say "the Conservatives are slashing the NHS!" when what they really mean is that they've slightly decreased the rate of increase, so by every metric it's still skyrocketing (but not enough to those who want to dump infinite…

Dude, I'm gonna have to ask you to back up your statements with some actual data, because what you said doesn't match the what I found at all.

To be specific, I mean these charts of those countries' total spending [0] and govt/compulsory spending [1] during that time period. (Using the OECD stats visualization tool [2].)

For total spending [0] UK's spend-growth was less than France's (not greater) and for govt/compulsory spending [1] the UK's larger growth over that period was still in the same ballpark of ~1.31x versus France's ~1.28.

In other words, the nearest number I can derive for your "increasing at a rate X% higher than France's" is around 1.31/1.28 = ~2.4%. Yet you said 2000%! That's a gap of three entire orders of magnitude which desperately need explanation.

[0] https://data.oecd.org/chart/7jcQ

[1] https://data.oecd.org/chart/7jcV

[2] https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

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