Matt Bevan

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.

When it was used to manage logistics and supply chains, it looked like Factorio.

When it was used by law enforcement agencies,

Well, an ICE official said it's basically like a Google's map interface where you can look around the United States.

You can zoom in on targets.

You then click on an individual person and it brings up their name, a photo.

We'll get into how it's being used for immigration enforcement in our next episode.

But looking at it dispassionately, it's clearly impressive software.

way better than the PowerPoint nightmares they used to deal with.

But programming these maps, which Palantir calls the ontology, was slow, painstaking work.

It involved writing incredibly complicated software and talking to a lot of different people, so they didn't overemphasise the importance of any one particular data source or ignore another one.

It also didn't entirely solve the marble jar problem.

Because each industry needed information laid out in different ways, the systems didn't talk to each other perfectly.