This is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases.

I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.

▲

NemoNobody 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think Palintr ought to be nationalized and placed under the jurisdiction of several competing watchdog agencies - it can generate automatically our annual, quarterly and etc datasets for specific, selected things.

Anyone in disagreement needs to read about Palintr and what has intentionally been said about it

▲

commandlinefan 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants)

Well, at least they're paying those consultants a lot of money, since they're charging a lot for them... right? Right?

	▲	vscode-rest 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes. If you worked at pltr as a FDE you are now wealthy.
	▲	doctorpangloss 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		no i think you and the people you are replying to are getting it completely backwards people think Palantir makes a lot of money. did Palantir make a lot of money? No. Accenture Federal Services, Leidos Defense Civil IT & Services, Booz Allen Hamilton Gov Consulting & Cyber, General Dynamics Technologies, SAIC, and CACI combined made $61.9b in 2024, compared to all of Palantir which made $2.9b. so if you just look at some IT and defense companies' gov IT sales segments - we're not even including Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing where calculating such a thing is complex - Palantir's revenue looks very, very small. people think Palantir makes vanilla "consultants" and “typical enterprise vendor vibes" products. does the thing that Palantir make work? we're talking about it! I think the reason we don't talk about Raytheon's version of this app is that Raytheon's (or Accenture's or...) version doesn't work haha

▲

genidoi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Referring to engineers with top secret+ security clearances as "consultants" seems reductionistic.

▲

bri3d 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In what way? I'm genuinely curious; I would describe an engineer who is provided to build a customer product alongside a customer as either a "contractor" or a "consultant," depending mostly on their employer. A security clearance just changes what customers and products they work for.

▲

vscode-rest 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Contractor makes sense, consultant is a bit weird because the typical understanding is that a consultant comes in to share knowledge, not build product.

▲

tym0 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Then you're not familiar with software consultancy because that's exactly what they do.

	▲	vscode-rest 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah ok then let’s just call them contractors because that’s what exactly what they do.

▲

throwawayq3423 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ok they are "consultants" with a federally guaranteed moat.