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Palantir for Developers

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12 pointsrobertkoss8 comments

I feel like this has assumed people have an understanding of Palantir's different products. This is for their AIP product, but even going to the AIP product page[1], I don't know what AIP is. The tagline "We show, they tell" still doesn't tell me anything about how I would use this.

[1]https://aip.palantir.com/

I am with you. It is hard to tell what it is. After reading the docs it seems like they have a backend (Foundry Ontology). To make development for it easier, you can now generate an SDK (Ontology SDK) that is specific to your project (or your project's ontology) using their Developer Console. You can use this SDK with your favorite language, like Typescript or Python.

It took me too long to figure it out to even consider developing for it.

AIP is just marketing bullshit IMO. It is an module in Foundry which just allows you to do LLM stuff. Combining it with the ontology is very powerful though.

I hate the fact that they started calling this AIP. It is just their existing product, which is great, Foundry.

Man this company is such a fraud. Everything YC suggests not to do they do it to make them sound so much more than they are. Palantir is outsourced ChartJS (I worked closely with some of their "forward deployed engineers" lmao) and god knows what this AIP thing is.

I have to disagree honestly. I have access to Foundry and it is way more than analytics. It is rather comparable to Databricks then to BI tools IMO and great for non-technical users.

The "downside" of the product is that you have to invest time into coming up with an ontology of your company, which can be very time-consuming and difficult.

I question how valuable the ontology is even once you come up with it.

It seems to me if the idea behind all this was that valuable, it would have transformed banking in the 2000s and all banks would currently run on Palantir products.

Like the graph for songs in the example, Palantir always seems like some some kind of technological theatrical performance to convince non-tech people that it is more than it really is.

To be fair, Palantir started building this commercial ontology stuff in the early 2010s and the product now seems to really gain traction in certain business areas, like energy and manufacturing.

I think the ontology becomes especially valuable when using LLMs, because you can traverse the entities of your business without knowing anything about the infrastructure behind it. You essentially have an object API into your business for the LLM to use.

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