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How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

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Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#91

Post by bazqux2 »

bane wrote: post #68
bazqux2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That matches my understanding of their tech stack as well. I also understand why people don't do an open sourced version - it doesn't pay nearly as well as having a job. What I find interesting about this is that in effect Palantir is acting as a consulting company while pretending to be a software tooling company. This allows them to claim a higher earnings multiple to inflate value and extract more money out of VCs…

What's pretty interesting is that my understanding of their licensing scheme is that it is not cheap per seat per year. Something on the order of $10-12k. There was a pricing sheet that floated around a few months ago that was released through a FOIA request. So it sounds like they covered their initial development R&D costs through licensing, led with that tool into consulting. My understanding is that many of the t…

You should check out Ab Inito, an even more secretive ETL company that predates Palantir and is also milking the DoD (it's an age old racket). They're $90K per seat per year and it's basically a crappy version of Jenkins. Apparently they have staff that search the internet and sue anyone who mentions them. Not even Palantir does that. So let's see how long this posts lasts :)

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#92

Post by pinewurst »

bazqux2 wrote: post #91
bane wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's pretty interesting is that my understanding of their licensing scheme is that it is not cheap per seat per year. Something on the order of $10-12k. There was a pricing sheet that floated around a few months ago that was released through a FOIA request. So it sounds like they covered their initial development R&D costs through licensing, led with that tool into consulting. My understanding is that many of the t…

You should check out Ab Inito, an even more secretive ETL company that predates Palantir and is also milking the DoD (it's an age old racket). They're $90K per seat per year and it's basically a crappy version of Jenkins. Apparently they have staff that search the internet and sue anyone who mentions them. Not even Palantir does that. So let's see how long this posts lasts :)

http://www.abinitio.com/en/

Wikipedia: "Ab Initio maintains a high level of secrecy regarding their products. Some people working with their product, even those who work for organizations who use Ab Initio, operate under a non-disclosure agreement which prevents them from revealing Ab Initio technical information to the public."

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#93

Post by hinkley »

bazqux2 wrote: post #33
6502nerdface wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressionistically, over the past 6-8 months or so, I've seen a lot of new resume flow coming out of Palantir (as a hiring manager at a large fintech co). I get the impression that they're bleeding talent.

After the BuzzFeed article and Unicorn Flyers they bumped pay and bonuses by ~20%. This was around 6-8 months ago. From what you're saying it sounds like it wasn't enough.

My experience, limited as it is, is that nobody talks out loud about turnover until something awful has already happened. It's always too little too late.

Maybe that's because these things tend to only happen when there's a serious lack of respect and the employees have noticed. You can't bribe people into thinking you respect them. It just looks like being bought off. Twist the knife a little won't you?

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#94

Post by dredmorbius »

bazqux2 wrote: post #89
dredmorbius wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this ontologies within the field of AI not working, or more generally? Do you have references to any specific discussions on this? Curious as I'm doing some work of my own (well outside AI) in which developing ontologies strikes me as useful, though I'd prefer not falling into any well-worn traps. (My use is largely comping up with useful descriptive models of otherwise hairy concepts.)

I meant generally they are generally not useful. Sometimes they are. It depends on the purpose and what you want to build and who it's for. Given that you're building a descriptive model it would depend if you're working with facts or with probabilities. If it's facts then Ontologies should work fine, for probabilities I'd recommend Bayesian techniques. The input for these are usually small. From the sounds of it you…

An ontology of technlogical mechanisms (or dynamics):

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww

Particularly in economic and policy discussion, technology is just "technology". A black box. In economics, Solow's Residual is described, by Solow, as "the measure of our ignorance" of factor productivity growth influences -- it's quite literally, statistically, what's left over after accounting for labour and capital.

I see a few quite evident classifications which strike me as useful:

1. Fuels. Apply more energy to something, it tends to happen faster. Wood, plant and animal oils, fossil fuels, nuclear fission, possibly fusion.

2. Material properties. Some things are highly dependent on specific material properties. Conductivity of gold, silver, copper, and aluminium. Ferromagnetism. Hardness of diamond. Softness of graphite. Semiconducting of silicon. Fertilising properties of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Many others. Point being, you're now locked into availablity and other properties of that material.

3. Specific process knowledge. What used to be called "arts". Most of what's now considered "technology", from agriculture to zymurgy (though zyumurgy's actually fairly close to agriculture...). These approach theoretical efficiency limits.

4. What seem to be dendritic or web structured aspects. Computer chips and Moore's law are today's classic example, but I'd count communications, transport, and trade networks, cities and urbanisations, knowledge itself, and other elements among these. What they have in common is an increasing rate of progress with greater accumulation, modulo retarding factors.

There are several other elements. Sensing and measurement increase various capabilities -- navigation and fine metal machining come to mind. Symbolic processing, from speech and writing to abstract maths and programming. Organisation -- of people, states, business, and finance.

The final element, and one which popped out at me whilst devising the ontology, was the concept of hygiene or pollution factors. They're a distinct class of phenomena which if not addressed tend to put a damper on further growth, everything from infectuous disease in cities to heavy metal pollution, salination of croplands, traffic congestion, spam and fraud in communications and business networks. It's a superset of common categories such as "pollution" or "disease" or "social breakdown".

Anyhow, that's what I'm working on. I find it a useful organising tool, still developing the idea.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#95

Post by dredmorbius »

gaur wrote: post #85
dredmorbius wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per annum, per centum, per mille, per capita, et cetera, et cetera. These are Latin phrases, borrowed especially in British English as Great Britain was occupied by Latin speakers for nearly 400 years -- 43 CE through 410 CE. Latin continued to be the language of diplomacy, religion, philosophy, and science through the 18th and 19th century. It is, for all practical intents, proper British English. https://en.m.wikti…

> borrowed especially in British English as Great Britain was occupied by Latin speakers for nearly 400 years -- 43 CE through 410 CE. Can you explain how Latin loanwords were loaned into English during this period? In your explanation, please make use of the facts that (1) there were no English speakers in Great Britain before 410 CE, and moreover (2) there was, by definition, no such language as English until Anglo…

You're more than welcome to explore this yourself.

You are, otherwise, being what the modern English derivative of the Sumerian ansu describes.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#96

Post by manigandham »

nitrogen wrote: post #41
manigandham wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the wrong attitude - there is no "waste" of braintrust. Innovation doesnt work like that, it comes from all over by people working on what they want to work on. What's wrong with advertising startups? Some of the most valuable companies on this planet are advertising companies because it's an essential part of success for any business.

You are kind of begging the question with your second paragraph. You argue that advertising is valuable because it's essential, but advertising is only essential because of its own existence. That doesn't make it valuable to society's broader goals.

> society's broader goals.

What are these exactly? Society is a summation of it's people and the success of the ventures they start are a big part of that.

> You argue that advertising is valuable because it's essential, but advertising is only essential because of its own existence.

What's that even mean? Lookup the definition of marketing and you'll see that connecting product information to consumers is needed to actually sell anything, and advertising is the distribution of this message. It's not only valuable, it's critical and necessary for business success.

You might not like being interrupted by ads (especially today's incarnation of ads online) but that is entirely separate from the concept of advertising itself. Saying that advertising isn't valuable is a gross misunderstanding of what advertising actually is.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#97

Post by argonaut »

bane wrote: post #74
argonaut wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff. Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals)…

> Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. Well, I think that's their intention. Pretend to be a software tool maker, but really be a services group. However, that radically changes the investment/return story. Because software, once you make a tool, you can sell it a hundred billion times for pretty much no additional cost and…

They have core tools, but obviously the majority of their code is bridging the core tools and their client's services.

Are you kidding me? If that extremely-slick dashboard (I hadn't seen it before) is representative of the quality of their UI for all their products (I actually doubt it is), as an enterprise/government company I am shocked they have not yet annihilated their competition. If it is representative, we now know why they have to spend money on lobbying - the only reason their competitors are alive is because of entrenched influence.

What's hilarious is you've broken down individual components of Palantir's offering and made the case that each individual component can be replaced by open-source or by a competitor. But that's literally missing the forest for the trees. It's the whole integrated package that matters. Nobody (or very few) is doing the whole package as well as they are.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#98

Post by argonaut »

bazqux2 wrote: post #78
argonaut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with the ontologies approach. Palantir is not aiming for a fully automated approach. Palantir's core product is a an entity graph mostly used and manipulated by humans for analysis. Basically their software is only meant to augment human analysis. That being said, from my conversations with them, they also have a traditional machine learning team for whenever that approach is needed for a produ…

There is usually something wrong with the ontologies approach as it rarely works. There is roughly two decades of evidence for this for anyone who cares to look. Five decades if you loosen the definition to include the family of logic and constraint programming - see AI Winter. There is nothing new about these ideas. It always looks and feels like it's going to work which is why humanity has persisted with it for so…

Again, Palantir is not an AI company. They are a data visualization and analytics company. So all your perfectly fine points about ontologies and AI winter are not relevant.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#99

Post by Aelinsaar »

dredmorbius wrote: post #83
Aelinsaar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should see huge sectors of the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, you'd weep.

Howso? Both of those involve actual research, which is to say, trying the impossible and unknown, to discover the possible and knowable. Though I'm also aware that there's a tremendous difference between chasing markets , which gives you drugs such as Viagra, or lifetime (type-II) diabetes management, rather than, say, wiping out tropical disease or promoting diet which would avoid diabetes in the first place. But wh…

Chasing markets, while antibiotic resistance grows for one.

Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington

#100

Post by bane »

argonaut wrote: post #97
bane wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. Well, I think that's their intention. Pretend to be a software tool maker, but really be a services group. However, that radically changes the investment/return story. Because software, once you make a tool, you can sell it a hundred billion times for pretty much no additional cost and…

They have core tools, but obviously the majority of their code is bridging the core tools and their client's services. Are you kidding me? If that extremely-slick dashboard (I hadn't seen it before) is representative of the quality of their UI for all their products (I actually doubt it is), as an enterprise/government company I am shocked they have not yet annihilated their competition . If it is representative, we…

> Nobody (or very few) is doing the whole package as well as they are.

If you read what I've said in this thread, I actually completely agree with you.

That map dashboard is like hundreds of similar dashboards I've seen elsewhere. I literally just saw a guy put something like that together in a couple weeks for an internal project where I work using mapbox and some d3.js bits. It even had a time slicer like this one and clickable map features.

So why isn't everybody as visible? I suspect getting a billion+/year in VC helps. But they've also managed to unify several key user-facing tools into a nice package and generalized it enough to support lots of different problem sets. Something that still seems beyond most companies.

From what I recall of their old public demo (Op Tradestop), their ontology data-input engine was pretty nice (if labor intensive) and it allowed for some easy to use queries against the enterpise graph. You can get pretty far locally with Visio, omnigraphle or yED, but they've managed to centralize the information input and retrieval in a nice way that seems easy enough to do by anybody who's seen it.

It might turn out that at scale it just doesn't provide enough value, or the labor intensive data entry parts make it not work well. Who knows?

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