If a senior government employee can get a very expensive Palantir contract approved, they have a good chance of a much better paid job at Palantir in the future:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/26055524.palantir-hired-30...

Buy: you need expertise in contracts and knowing what you need.

Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.

It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.

Because "nation states" are not one making decision either. It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group of them and even best of people who work on such positions usually choose it because of job security and stability.

Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.

And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.

This is a paradox that you see in many countries. I work for a private company that make software for the public sector in France, so I am very familiar with the subject. And to be fair, there are many cases where using contractor does make a lot of sense (seasonality or infrequent demands, shared resources, etc). But a lot of the population sees public spending as the biggest evil. This lead to the public sector putting a huge pressure on their biggest spending : payroll. This means fewer employees and worse pay. That makes the public sector not attractive to talent and unable to create a workforce for specific project that should have been fully in control of the public entity. Due to this, the public sector often has to go through private contractor, which ironically often cost more than if you had the skills internally. But increase the number of employee in your municipality and a part of the taxpayers are going to crucify you (somehow they are ok with paying millions to private contractors though). The internal vs. external spending is a difficult one and there is a lot of subtlety to it. Sadly, in the public discourse it is often reduced to "public spending bad" or "everything should be nationalized".

Isn't it obvious? Because governments aren't good at management. There's no incentive or feedback loop. A company goes out of business if it's operationally a mess or doesn't deliver value. Not always but it's highly correlated. Governments face no pressure like this. Maybe mild pressure on the very local level. But when you get to the national level, orgs like the Pentagon misplace trillions of dollars with not so much of a protest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...

See my comment on the AI replacing consultants story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48133728

Plausible deniability. "We paid £5 million for consultants who recommended this system, it's not our fault it turned out to be a steaming pile of crap that wasted £20 million and took 3 years".

If you get someone else to do it you are not responsible for failure.

if Palantir (or other consultancies) are friends with government decision makers (especially in the US) then spending more on a service is a feature, not a bug.

I owned Salesforce setup with 4 engineers and 500+ licenses. I don‘t see how could I replace our SF setup with an in-house product on the same budget within reasonable timeline. We won local competition within a few years, because our sales could use good CRM from day 1 and our competitor, according to the rumors I heard, could not calculate properly sales agent commission. Vendor lock-in is not always a stupid thing. Sometimes it‘s the bet that wins you a market.

No.

1. Palantir isn't selling consulting as much as Palantir is selling the confidence you get from buying a name brand. It's the same as paying for McKinsey to provide justification to do what you already want to do.

2. Palantir actually has some good core tech. An in house team can probably do a better job just because the incentives are better aligned, but they'll be starting from behind and have to catch up.

3. LLMs aren't at a level to replace a team of FDEs. Maybe in a couple of years. The role requires too much understanding of the human systems, and too much initiative to keep the ball rolling/acknowledge and deal with real problems.

Seriously what did LLMs replace or can replace? You are living in a world of dreams

No one got fired for buying ~IBM~ Palantir. (Well...)