A few dozen people have gathered to watch a presentation. It’s capably produced — like a midsize college professor’s audition for a TED Talk. The presenter, in a patterned blazer and blue oxford, is retired four-star general Gustave Perna. “I spent 40 years in the Army,” Perna begins, the hard edges of his New Jersey accent clanging a little in the room. “I was an average infantry officer. I was a great logistician.
The video cuts off with polite applause. The audience doesn’t seem to understand they’ve just been transported to a galaxy far, far away.delivers his State of the Union on March 7, he’ll likely become the first president to use the phrase artificial intelligence in the address. The president has been good on AI. Hison the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” threw a switch activating the federal bureaucracy’s engagement.
There’s another strain of skepticism that goes like this: Are you insane? AI might create all kinds of efficiency, but it’s also been known to have systemic biases that could get encoded into official government systems, lack transparency that could undermine public trust, make loads of federal jobs obsolete, and be vulnerable to data breaches that compromise privacy and sensitive information. If AI were a Big Pharma product the ads would be 10 minutes long.
Imagine all of an organization’s data sources as a series of garden hoses in your backyard. Let’s say the organization is a hospital. There are hoses for personnel, equipment, drugs, insurance companies, medical supplies, scheduling, bed availability and probably dozens of other things. Many of the hoses connect up to vendors and many connect to patients. No one can remember what some of them are supposed to connect to.
Thiel and Karp were law school classmates at Stanford in the early ’90s. They argued plenty, but agreed about enough to create Palantir with partial funding from, an investment arm of the CIA, and a few core beliefs. The first is that the United States is exceptional, and working to strengthen its position in the world benefits all humanity. “I’ve lived abroad,” Karp says. “I know is the only country that’s remotely as fair and meritocratic as America is.
Palantir’s saga doesn’t prove that government employees are bad, merely that humans can tolerate limitless amounts of dysfunction, especially when everyone around them is doing the same. They’re trapped in a system where all incentives point toward the status quo. Perna wants Palantir to think bigger, but remember: The Defense Department can embrace and expedite things in the name of national security that others cannot. It’s one of the most AI-friendly parts of the government.