Tech companies Palantir and Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies Palantir and Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures

theregister.com

I like how the article claims that Palantir and Anduril were independently named, as if Palmer Lucky had no clue Palantir existed and what they do.

Also a significant number of palantir senior leadership moved over to Andruil years ago. I would imagine this “fellowship” between the two companies has been in place for quite some time already

Palantir senior leadership had not so much moved to Anduril, as it had been founded by them. Three other Anduril cofounders are from Palantir.

How much of Palantir's business is regular law enforcement vs intelligence vs other things?

Intelligence work is, I would imagine, very dirty work at the best of times, and someone has to do it. My understanding is, what Palantir does there is kind of like CRM for terrorist groups. Not skynet or click-to-bomb software (I have no inside knowledge).

Police work doesn't have to be as dirty, not to regular citizens anyway, and I'm not sure how I would feel to be included in a Palantir-enabled all-encompassing pre-crime database.

Its actually mostly commercial afaik, Foundry is like data pipelines for big corps.

What are the open source alternatives to these companies? You know, so we can protect ourselves from them.

you want an open source alternative to a defense company?

Now we're talking, I have a few ideas for various kinds of drone fighters that I would like to try out.

Yep. 3d printing and local models should be 2nd amendment starting points in 2024.

Are you asking where is Sarah Connor

The same people propup the current genocide taking place in Palestine and the war in Ukraine. Their goal is neverending war with neverending profit at the expense of local populations. Don't invest in amoral enterprises.

Could heinous AI companies please stop using names from the sublime Lord of the Rings?

On the other hand, they make it easy to see them for what they are, they are not going to name themselves after Sauron after all.

I don't know if this is a tongue-in-cheek joke but there is an AI security system startup named Sauron.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20241209ny74705...

I was ignorant, but now am enlightened. I was tempted to use Nazgul instead of Sauron and realize I should have now.

All of these companies are founded/funded by peter thiel.

Are... are we the baddies?!

The article describes all of this

Does it integrate with any smart rings?

being a quiet source of inspiration does not pay as well, apparently

I worry about Palantir’s role in unchecked mass surveillance but anduril seems necessary given how wasteful and ineffective the incumbent defense contractors are. Adversaries are going there and mutual escalation seems inevitable.

They should use common words to express that they're defending us all, like a net, in the sky. Netsky or something.

Skyweb maybe?

I'll be back... with more name suggestions.

Aircatcher

I think this is a good direction, less threatening.

The cloud?

I've never made up my mind:

Were Peter Thiel et al ignorant of the ethical complexity around the Palantirs, that a sufficiently powerful user could control and distort what other users saw? Or was that part of the sales pitch?

You just made my day - whatever the answer :)

All praise our new enthusiastically violent tech companies.

I for one don't think moving fast and breaking things is a good approach to weaponized AI, but hey.

Those companies have always existed. The main difference is that their PR teams have convinced the press to use the relatively-neutral term "tech company". It's of course a lot less attractive to have a headline like:

"Mass surveillance company Palantir and drone vendor Anduril form partnership..."

But hey, they use computers, so they are a tech company now! Just like Tesla isn't a car company, so you should totally value their stock like one of those big tech companies doing Magic Cloud Stuff.

There's also AI, that despite it's failings brings an entirely new meaning to weaponized tech.

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