Something similar happened to me! It wasn’t quite as threatening since my boss isn’t a dick. Our CEO declared that we were going to work with Palantir. Not to solve any particular problem, but just because they wanted an announcement saying we were working with Palantir.
The Palantir team did a demo showing how amazing their product was. They showed it supposedly being fed a MicrosoftPrroject file, reading all the tasks, and then identifying which tasks were at risk. It spit out an answer saying something like “Task 123 may be at risk due to several factors including vendor reliability and blah blah.” Seemed really impressive - that would have taken a project manager and planner all week to figure out!
I got a hold of what they used for the demo and saw that it wasn’t reading a Project file. It was actually being given the task name as the prompt (“Task 123”) and then the prompt was "what would a project manager say about why this given task might be at risk?”
I told my boss that it was all smoke and mirrors. No complex analytics were being done. It was just basically “here’s a task, tell me why it could theoretically be at risk” - far different than “analyze this project plan, look at related data and identity what tasks are at risk and why”.
His response was “Good to know. Unfortunately the CEO has declared we’re moving forward with Palantir, so it is what it is.”
Somehow this company is worth billions of dollars.
vpol@feddit.uk 10 hours ago
Can we get the names of people who say that, so we can make sure they lose their jobs first?