Matt Bevan

So how exactly does it work?

For the first decade of Palantir's existence, basically nobody knew who they were or what they did.

They didn't even start posting on social media until 2015.

A person can see a pattern in a hundred things, but it's very hard for them to see a pattern in a million.

The company embedded technical experts inside classified US intelligence operations and facilities, trying to access as many different information sources as possible and figure out how they relate to each other.

Sticking with the marbles in jars, it worked like this.

Rather than all the information being siloed in individual jars, Palantir set up a table where all the marbles from the FBI, the CIA,

the NSA and other agencies could be poured onto and examined, allowing users to get a full picture by sorting information more logically and identifying patterns and connections.

Like really what it is, is creating a unified view

over lots of disparate data sources, which don't otherwise make sense together.

The reason they had so little public presence is that they really only had one customer, the US government.

Fighting ISIS, stopping human trafficking, supporting money laundering investigations.

According to their marketing, Palantir was all about organizing information in a way humans would find more intuitive.

Humans are incredible at insight.

It's just surfacing the right information for them to see.

They were effectively creating an enormous self-updating PowerPoint slide which could be used by humans to figure out what was really going on.

The result was software that kind of looked like my favourite type of video game, simulation games.

Stuff like SimCity, Transport Tycoon or Factorio.

Using Palantir's software was like looking down on the world from above with information displayed on a large flat map you could interact with.

When the military used it, it looked like Command and Conquer, with military assets both friendly and enemy displayed on a clickable satellite map.