Palantir technologies is a data science firm specialising in predictive-policing. There flagship product is the Palantir Gotham program.
Company Overview
Background
What does the Company do?
Palantir Technologies assists the world’s most important institutions in analysing large volumes of data to solve the most important real-world problems. Their applications are human driven and are described as ‘intelligence augmentation’, rather than artificial intelligence. Customers using their systems do not to be masters of machine learning and engineers from Palantir directly assist in the use of their systems.
Where did the Idea of the Company Come From?
The initial idea of the company came from the co-founder of Paypal, Peter-Thiel, who saw an opportunity to use Paypal’s fraud recognition systems to reduce terrorism. He felt that the available technology at the time (2004) was inadequate to solve real world problems and was also putting people’s data at risk.
What is the Companies Mission?
Palantir believes in augmenting human intelligence, not replacing it. They believe that machines are best used as a tool for human analysts rather than as their replacements.
What does Palantir Mean?
The name of the company comes from the ‘Palantiri’ seeing stones from ‘Lord of the Rings’, which were able to see events happening around the world.
Products
Palantir Gotham
The flagship government product of Palantir. It is the result of the work between Palantir and the United States Intelligence community. This includes but is not limited to the central intelligence agency (CIA), the federal bureau of investigation (FBI), army intelligence and the national security agency (NSA) constituting a total of 16 American departments and military branches.[1] It uses an AI operating system to predictively police.[2] Little else is known about this work due to its secretive nature.
Palantir Metropolis
The main commercial product of Palantir. Palantir metropolis is designed to help financial institutions make sense of large amounts of data and extract valuable insights from it. It includes a range of tools and features that allow users to explore and analyse data, create visualisations, and build custom applications and workflows.[3] It does this by making use of a machine learning algorithm.[4]
However, Palantir Metropolis received controversy after it was revealed that JP Morgan had used it to spy on its own employees (to identify disgruntled employees) using data gathered from company-owned devices. This data included emails, search histories and GPS data. [4]
Nowadays it has been rebranded and semi-merged [unconfirmed] with the Palantir Foundry product.[5]
Palantir Foundry
This product was produced for the explicit purpose to analyse the operations of the UK NHS vaccination program.[6] It garnered considerable controversy due to Palantir's previous work with the US intelligence and hence extensive military ties.[7]
Nowadays it has been rebranded and semi-merged with the Palantir Metropolis product.
Palantir Apollo
This product is the main DevOps support product of Palantir. It is a continuous delivery system.[8] Its main function is to manage the deploying of the Gotham and Foundry products by allowing the linking of multiple public and private cloud networks.[9]
This allows Palantir Apollo to be sold as a software as a service (SaaS) product (subscription service similar to Netflix) and reduces the need for the company to act as consultants to its clients.
AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform)
This is the newest product of Palantir aiming to integrate large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT into its privately operated networks (of its clients).[10] However, after the company successfully demonstrated its us in war, where a military operator was able to deploy operations and receive responses via an AI chatbot, the CEO has said that AI poses serious potential risk and that human oversight must be required.[11]
Other
Palantir has also entered joint ventures with First Data to extract trends from customer transactions.[11]
References and notes
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20160302190119/http://www.dni.gov/index.php/intelligence-community/members-of-the-ic
- ↑ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/
- ↑ https://www.dailypalantir.com/post/palantir-overview-beginners#:~:text=Palantir%20Metropolis%20is%20designed%20to,build%20custom%20applications%20and%20workflows.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/
- ↑ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/
- ↑ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/campaign-launched-to-get-palantir-out-of-nhs.html
- ↑ https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-palantir-sales-ipo-20190107-story.html
- ↑ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/apollo/
- ↑ https://blog.palantir.com/palantir-apollo-powering-saas-where-no-saas-has-gone-before-7be3e565c379
- ↑ https://www.palantir.com/platforms/aip/
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-data-reports-first-quarterly-profit-in-more-than-seven-years-1423602902