Palantir's software stack is not really that complex, and their FDE workforce is famously... undereducated. Canada should be able to pull it off, there's much to improve on.
Peter Thiel abusing government backchannels.
> What's preventing a Canadian competitor from doing the same?
A lack of access to corrupt government backchannels.
Government procurement takes a lot of time to see through to completion; Palantir is not a new company, they're over 20 years old now. To succeed you also need money for lobbyists; regardless of what you feel of them they are a necessary part of the system. Also at the government level, especially at the level of federal governments, you are competing with Oracle, IBM, and other similarly large companies which is difficult to do if you are a new, small company.
You as canada have only two options:
1) use closed sourced systems
2) use chinese models, with their own risks
3) hardware, i think it's clear.
Cohere is not even in the list of top competitors .
Any competent developer already immediately flees to the US to triple their take-home pay at first chance and Canadian employers are fully aware of this.
Lots do move to the US too, but it's a filter for ambition, not competence. Don't confuse the two.
The only way is Canada joining the EU in making their own tech, but even then, this will take at least a decade to materialize, if any, don’t forget all infrastructure hardware is still US, hp/dell/nvidia/etc plus decades of software and OSes, so yeah.