From reading the case studies it seems most of Foundry in the NHS is geared towards operational data e.g. how to utilise capacity within an hospital efficiently.

Palantir does have very strong capabilities to protect data e.g. security markings, not allowing data to be exported.

FDP is using patient-level health data so not something likely to be made public, and the goal is to manage this specific health system so not really a research endeavour. This would still be the case even if the UK had picked another supplier or built it's own platform.

Separately, there are some Trusted Research Environments out there for approved research projects.

> My main question generally is, why is palantir doing the work that research institutions should be doing for governments.

Because they pay better.

Have you seen research institutions lobbying the governments ?

Palantir is inside Coles supermarkets in Australia. I've stopped going to Coles because of that.

https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...

And inside the US too!

I assume "planting" is a typo'ed "palantir", in which case I agree completely. And it's true inside the US as much as outside.

You should also include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, and any tech company that has a defence contract with the US Department of Defence / War and ICE or any government.

Yet the big problem is of course for those being “principled” about this subject are not serious themselves as some either work there and profit from it, continue to use their products including LLMs or will concede to using them due to social inertia.

The only time this is taken seriously is when all these contracts are scrapped. (They won’t be.)

Why?

Why?

They are the only ones who can really do predictions on a policy level. Ever since the post "they will just embrace liberty" ideology disaster that was the iraq-war mining of the cellphones aka palantirs for behavioural data has given some pretty gnarly insights to what mankind can do and cant do. None of this "We shall just degrowth and life in harmony with nature" or "all cultures can equally well form lawfull societies" nonsense. And if you have the knowledge about what a thing can and cant do, you can package it into a simulator and sell predictions to policymakers. Predictions & policies like : "Let refugeewaves in and the idealistic-retarded movements will poison themselves, wither and die".

When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.

Hopefully Palantir has the necessary skillset to navigate the political environment which involves developing a platform that: 1. protects patient privacy 2. supports needs of providers (e.g. hospitals, gps, specialists, DoH) 3. allows providers to use data to support their operations 4. allows NHS to use the data to improve patient outcomes and efficiency

This Foundry demo impressed me at the time but its a bit dated now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms

Actual data analyst from a hospital talking about what the platform achieves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps47Azr2Jz0

It's totally reasonable to be skeptical of palantir without knowing the exact product in question, given their record.

Healthcare systems often use Foundry for organizing data. It's a complex problem and Foundry has a good toolset for the job.

https://www.palantir.com/offerings/health/

They were already contracted by NHS to monitor vaccine distribution and covid data in 2020, that contract was terminated and moved to Mozaic Services after public outcry over data privacy concerns. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/uk-ends-one-of-its-data-shar...

Palantir indeed has a lot of clients, but governments - and in particular, US federal agencies - are still the biggest and most lucrative customers. Nor is Palantir blind to what those customers are using the tech for - indeed, their whole point is "deploying" people to customer's premises so that they can work hands on. So when they do that for the ICE contract, say, they know full well what they are optimizing - proudly so. It's way more close and personal than what most of the big tech firms do (although you did list some exceptions).

But no, it's not illegal to provide panopticon-as-a-service to authoritarian governments, unfortunately. Especially not when you ask said governments.

As to what you can do to change this, I honestly don't know, and I say this as someone who resigned from NVIDIA recently because of this: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-palantir-ai-enterp... - but there's no shortage of people willing to work on this stuff. And in US at least I feel big tech enmeshed with the feds have such a strong lobby, neither major party is going to do anything useful about it in terms of passing laws making the business model itself illegal.

Mostly the x is evil crowd are reasoning based on political affiliation. As is the GoodLaw Project and Jolyon Maugham who have a history of doing so.

All media is agitprop now. If the CEO of a company says things that oppose the political chorus of either side, they become subject to witch hunts such as this.

Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas

Has he helped Russia? I know he did help Ukraine partly with Starlink and I hadn't heard much beyond that

Not reproduced here, where it dismisses the dialog.

Clicking anything on the banner does absolutely nothing Hanlon's Razor wins out here I think

with a CEO that openly boast their product is great at getting data to kill people, what's there not to hate?

Because the founders are evil and should in in prison?

I think a fair number of people who hate Palantir do hate Google too.

Google at least pretends to "not be evil".

Palantir is proud of their work on the ICE contract.

Palantir is a spyware company and the CEO Alex Karp has explicitly said that thier goal is to use their tooling to create fear in people and kill people (i.e people deemed enemies of the United States)

You should probably hate Google too, but I think a lot of Palantir hate comes from (well deserved) hatred for Peter Thiel, who has injected himself directly into conservative politics.

Billionaires buying their way into the political system should be hated implicitly, no matter their political affiliation.

Palantir is more directly involved in the surveillance state and military industrial complex.

Not saying Google isn't, but it's at least not as public or blatant, and is much less of what Google does overall.

Palantir makes AI to determine if who you are auto droning is a valid target or not. You can imagine why people dislike that, especially given that it's been deployed in Palestine

Palantir might just pretty up the display of the data that is aggregated by other vendors, which source their data from other vendors, who collect their data from "opt-in" services, which technically explain how they work somewhere in a 200 page ToS. But at some point you gotta look at the sum of the incremental issues and say enough is enough.

The issue is they don't then fuck off, they instead charge ever increasing rates yearly to maintain that simple port an 18 year old could do.

It's not about what the company does but about who they are, and the hatred is ancient.

This omits the crucial part of which old databases they do this to when working for e.g. the US federal government, and what the result is used for.

When it came to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust, IBM also just "did the databases".

Nieve, or wilfully in denial?

> Is the insinuation that Thiel will sabotage the NHS servers because he wants to see it fail, at the cost of billions if he were to be caught?

I think the insinuation is that if someone is explicitly outspoken against something, don't hire/contract the guy/organization for tasks that are meant to help that something get better, the incentives just aren't aligned. Which in my mind, ignoring all the politics, make a ton of sense, I wouldn't want an anti-environmentalist to be "Head of Environmental Impact" or someone anti-education to be "Head of Education" or even involved in anything education.

Billionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting.

The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.

Because the alternative is even worse?