‘Purge Palantir!’: Union nurses warn Big Tech and Big Brother are invading our healthcare system
“Palantir has no place in our hospitals, no place in our community… Nurses are advocates first. We’re trained to advocate and to speak up when something is wrong, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Sept 14 (Reuters) – Large technology companies, including Palantir Technologies, Nvidia and Booz Allen Hamilton, could restrict or cease to use advanced AI models unless Anthropic and OpenAI guarantee not misusing their intellectual property, the Information reported on Monday.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is capitalizing on such concerns by pitching isolated cloud environments and its own AI offerings to draw clients, according to the report that cited people familiar with the matter.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for AI companies to slow the pace of frontier model development, warning that capabilities are advancing faster than researchers can understand or control — a position quickly endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
But a number of former Palantir employees tell WIRED they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works. Some people think it’s a data broker that buys information from private companies and resells it to the government. Others think it’s a data miner, constantly scanning the internet for unique insights it can collect and market to customers. Still others think it maintains a giant, centralized database of information collected from all of its clients. In reality, Palantir does none of these things, but the misconceptions continue to persist.
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A version of this logic pervades the internal culture at Palantir. When asked what distinguishes it from other tech companies, former employees consistently mentioned its “flat” staffing structure. Engineers can laterally move to more prestigious or challenging projects if they prove worthy based on their skills and connections. One former staffer tells WIRED that this made the company feel like a meritocracy where the best people, and the best ideas, naturally rise to the top.
Some former employees say that Palantir’s meritocratic culture helped cultivate a sense of loyalty among staff. But they also believe that this can make it difficult to speak out against the company or its business decisions. (Gordon said that Palantir “prides itself on a culture of fierce internal dialog and disagreement on difficult issues related to our work.”)
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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