I interned at Palantir some time ago. I had essentially no idea of what their software did until I had a demo at the onsite, and it wasn't really clear what the product was really for until I started working there. The product is simultaneously very powerful, but also incredibly underwhelming and doesn't live up to Palantir's mystique at all. This sounds contradictory, so let me explain:
Palantir builds data visualization software. They repeatedly claim that they do more than data visualization, and while that's true to an extent, easily 80% of what they do is data visualization. The key thing that Palantir does is their ability to ingest diverse sets of data sets from a variety of sources (often crufty government databases) and build relationships between this data. Say you're tracking down pill mills. Transactions on Schedule II drugs might be in one database, and criminal records related of pharmacies are on a different database. Palantir can ingest both data sets, and let people browse Schedule II drug transactions at pharmacies with criminal connections. And then do things like filter for people who bought the same drug twice or more in one day, a big indicator of nefarious activity.
This is pretty boring in my opinion, but the reality is that this workflow is often replacing things like browsing rows in Excel. I think the company's value is real, this tool does make it a lot easier to do a lot of tasks that involve making correlations between different sources of data.
The issue with demoing Palantir is that there's no one product. Something like half the company's engineers works on customer-specific customizations and UIs. Here's a couple demos that showcase a couple versions of Gotham:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZug8kV28RU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DzIQ-ygQV4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCR_LBzur-k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8bwhAW2Mg
A more in-depth explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyDEHCcQ_bk
Overall it was an interesting company and I liked my time there. I said "the product is boring and does not live up to the mystique at all" but that's referring to the user-facing product. The underlying technology is actually pretty cool. Fitting all these different sources of data into one data store and building effective abstractions for developers to retrieve that data and build useful features on top of it is a challenging problem.
Palantir builds data visualization software. They repeatedly claim that they do more than data visualization, and while that's true to an extent, easily 80% of what they do is data visualization. The key thing that Palantir does is their ability to ingest diverse sets of data sets from a variety of sources (often crufty government databases) and build relationships between this data. Say you're tracking down pill mills. Transactions on Schedule II drugs might be in one database, and criminal records related of pharmacies are on a different database. Palantir can ingest both data sets, and let people browse Schedule II drug transactions at pharmacies with criminal connections. And then do things like filter for people who bought the same drug twice or more in one day, a big indicator of nefarious activity.
This is pretty boring in my opinion, but the reality is that this workflow is often replacing things like browsing rows in Excel. I think the company's value is real, this tool does make it a lot easier to do a lot of tasks that involve making correlations between different sources of data.
The issue with demoing Palantir is that there's no one product. Something like half the company's engineers works on customer-specific customizations and UIs. Here's a couple demos that showcase a couple versions of Gotham:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZug8kV28RU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DzIQ-ygQV4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCR_LBzur-k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8bwhAW2Mg
A more in-depth explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyDEHCcQ_bk
Overall it was an interesting company and I liked my time there. I said "the product is boring and does not live up to the mystique at all" but that's referring to the user-facing product. The underlying technology is actually pretty cool. Fitting all these different sources of data into one data store and building effective abstractions for developers to retrieve that data and build useful features on top of it is a challenging problem.