We can't make this stuff up: Palantir, Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures Two tech businesses that were independently named after objects from The Lord of the Rings have formed a partnership – or should that be a fellowship? According to a Friday announcement, analytics outfit Palantir and autonomous systems vendor Anduril have formed "a new consortium to ensure that the US government leads the …
...that The Lord of the Rings was not fiction but prophecy, a direct warning from the future.
I vote we do what we always do and just ignore the warning. It's the least-possible-effort solution, and that's where we, as a species, truly excel.
Play to your strengths, say I.
Exabytes of defense data, indispensable for AI training and inferencing, are currently evaporating ... and that's actually good - getting bogged down with exabytes of data is the exact opposite of being fluid and responsive. And notice that "security" was listed second. Not saying there aren't specific applications where AI/machine-learning aren't useful - just that they should be chosen and fed sparingly.
> getting bogged down with exabytes of data is the exact opposite of being fluid and responsive.
Not to mention that, to be useful in training, you need to tag the data to at least indicate if that was a good or bad result: comparable to the tagging of training images to say "this photo contains a cat", "this is a dog" - oh, and that cats and dogs are not the same thing. Tagging takes a *lot* of effort by humans[1], doing it for all of those exabytes...
Hmm, maybe they could insist that the pilots/sappers/able-seamen type up notes as the mission progresses? "Dear Diary...".
[1] which is why, before LLMs[2] were the only thing being talked about, articles were telling us that nets were trained on such and such curated collections of images; even the bulk scraping of web images relied on them being minimally tagged as "my photos of trains" or "actor X at the Oscars".
[2] LLMs get away with more bulk scraping of absolutely everything because, to start with, you assume that anything published is tagged as a "good" sequence of characters[3][4] and fingers crossed the web page content tags indicates "en" versus "es".
[3] yes, yes, the "real" ones tokenise with bigger units than just characters etc etc; hand wavey simplifications, ok?
[4] "good" in someone's mind, at least (sideways glance at Reddit posts, eyebrows raised)[5]
[5] this has gone off track, these exabytes of sensor data aren't going to be fed into LLMs, they'll go into a neural net with appropriate pre- and post- processing... Oh heck, they'll just dump the lot into ChatGPT, won't they!
I have to say as a Pratchett fan, reading your post footnotes was extremely gratifying!
Maybe try adding a little something1 for a bit of sizzle2?
1 - A well placed superscript does wonders for the soul
2 - As any street-based hot snack purveyor understands, in order to sell the sausage, you have to sell the sizzle first3
3 - Sausage-in-a-bun, sir? Finest pig, I can assure you
Thus leading to the question - "where do you work?"
"Gandalf Street, Mordor, Warsaw.
...
"And how do I get there?"
"Fly you fools!"
[My coat - why the one with, well you'll never guess what I've got in my pocketseses. My only excuse is that I wrote the first two lines of this before donating blood - and the rest afterwards.]
Michael Hoffmann,
There is a connection. Both Anduril, and several of the remaining Palantir end up owned by Aragorn.
So I think what we need is a new company, called Longbottom Leaf.
Or perhaps Uruk Hai - that sounds like a nice company name. Presumably Sauron will have to come up with a name for the little drones that they're going to launch at the unsuspecting passers-by - I'd suggest Nazgul would do quite nicely.
If that counts as a connection then "both made by Elves" could be used. Or anything else spurious.
You shall not pass on this!
PS: also, only one usable Palantir, unless your idea of a good time is one of those "roasting fire" screen-savers
PPS: though if they invested in developing diving and salvage equipment, Gondor could have tried to get the Osgiliath stone back. Not like that massive thing would have floated down the Anduin. It prolly went down like the Titanic..
As a naming thing this was sort of popular in the early 2000s, I know that Palantir weren't the only ones similarly 'inspired' to borrow names from Tolkien.
The only real shocker is that Palmer Luckey's me-too effort popped up over a decade after the overuse of Anduril as a name died out from general embarrassment.
Then again cringe is very much his space, and reselling old existing stuff as somehow new/pioneering/innovative/disruptive/blah is his thing these days so...
I'd have thought Anduril would be a good name for a "herbal viagra"...
Tackiest sword related product name I've seen was a kind of mild soap for the equestrian market, "Excalibur". Marketed at pink-cheeked young ladies whose (boy) horses were suffering an excess of, well, smeg as Craig Charles would say, and couldn't drop the old hosepipe to make water.
[Sauron, the startup, apparently makes "deterrence pods" that contain drones capable of detecting anyone who approaches a location where they are installed – scanning their faces, and shining a searchlight on anything the system deems suspicious.]
Yeah because criminals have never covered their faces or evaded cameras and having something as evident as a searchlight to let criminals know where the camera pod is won't backfire at all.
Throwing away almost all sensor data is exactly the right thing to do. Nearly all sensor data is telling you that the thing you expected to happen is what happened. The building temperature is within tolerance of its set point. The pallet contained the expected number of cartons, and the cartons contained the expected number of items. The flow in the pipe is nominal. The temperature-sensitive drug remained within acceptable range throughout its supply chain journey.
Even CERN retains and analyses just 0.004% of the data it generates from collisions. (As long ago as 2018, it was generating 400 exabytes a year of data.)
The key to any kind of sensor data is to focus on the data that is out of spec (and some amount of the data that was a prelude to crossing the threshold.)
I'm also fascinated to know how they intend to store and analyze "exabytes of defense data". At that scale you are inevitably archiving data to tape, so good luck feeding your GPUs fast enough to keep them busy.
Frankly, this sounds like a classic "jump on the bandwagon" and "bamboozle the government into giving us money" play. And with Elmo whispering in TFG's ear, it might just work.
It would be an immense folly to neither imagine nor realise that the likes of analytics outfit Palantir and autonomous systems vendor Anduril be late and virtual newbies in a discipline which maybe more than a few have fabulously mastered some considerable time ago and would exercise at will to please themselves in service of future clients enamoured of JOINT AIDVentures.*
And it is not as if such has never before, nor is not still being freely shared with certain forces for consideration and enjoinment .... although such is the exquisite temptation for a selfish exclusive executive function rather than delivery of a magnanimous inclusive utility with outstanding abilities in its fields of exploration, exploitation and experimentation ....... it can result in a failure to make sterling good use of simple targeted communication which imperils the likelihood of future direct provision of info and intel which will render one deaf, dumb and blind to that which is being freely made available elsewhere to A.N.Others for onward greater sharing, either hostile enemy or competing contemporary or opposing peer or radical revolutionary groups.
It is a prized environment in which to excel has one some clear way out in front of all others and preparing the paths ahead they are to follow. I Kid U Not.
[JOINT AIDVentures* ....... JOINT Operations Internetworking Novel Technologies Advancing IntelAIgently Designed Ventures.]
amanfromMars [2412070947] ..... airs and shares on https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/12/6/emerging-technology-horizons-strengthening-defense-with-private-capital[Thank you. Your comment
willmay not be displayed soon after reviewing.]Methinks the difficulty to confront and overcome for raising interest levels for venture capitalists considering "shifting their investment strategies toward so-called hard tech and deep tech opportunities: hardware products with high technical risk, versus software products with high market risk" is the likely perception and fear of the reality being horrendously expensive product/program costs with high technical risk versus relatively inexpensive software program/product costs with high market capture potential.
The Great Geopolitical End Game is not as a hardware centric war to be lost, it is hearts and minds battles to be won ..... and ideally won without having to exercise scorched earth practices that punish and exterminate the wannabe psychopath and maniacal barbarian.
And lost and won they will be with the simple sharing and recognition, or otherwise as the case may be whenever ignorance reigns in arrogant teams kept unaware, of that very particular and peculiar notion/observation/remote virtual realisation/uncommon thought.
Have you not yet noticed what media has been telling you ..... that reality is changed, and rapidly evolving in a vast new direction with alternative novel secure key levers intelligently designed for A.N.Others in Universal Virtual Command and Remote Practical Control ?
OMG, dude! What you have been feeding that bot? I literally can't read this one at all! .... trindflo
Surely, as you can evidently read, trindflo, it is not recognising nor understanding the discipline being talked about which has one perplexed and minded to share one's concern and consternation.
A discipline which has one as a Regenerative AI Representative, teasing in and presenting the great unknown unknown of an easily programmed novel and noble future and in a constant merry state of mega metadata beta testing for live flaws and viral vulnerabilities that both expose and exploit systemic and tragic endemic human weaknesses, is practically bound to do that .... be quite perplexing ..... to virtually any live thinking body pondering on the supply and delivery of such matters for enjoyment on Earth.
Or is Heavenly Detailing simply normal but clearly complex in a SMARTR SuperNatural Evolution of SCADA Administration Systems for Virtual Machine Rule?
Is that where y'all are currently at ...... patiently waiting to be led and moved on and out of the Great AI and IT Green Room?
Tolkien's influence grows:
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"Strider is on a mission to deliver strategic intelligence to enable faster, more confident decision-making for organizations around the world."
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