Dr Karp 2022 World Economic Forum:
Alex Karp On Palantir’s Business Use Cases & Philosophy:
Peter Thiel On World Economic Forum:
Cybersecurity Outlook:
Palantir’s Involvement Within Cybersecurity:
Dr Alex Karp 2022 World Economic Forum:
Dr Alex Karp, CEO at Palantir technologies is set to attend the World Economic Forum on Wednesday 25th of May, 2022.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, that brings together its membership of political and business leaders each year to discuss major issues that impact the global economy. These include but are not limited to political, economic, social, and environmental concerns.
There is a sign-up link here, available for all Palantir investors:
Alex Karp On Palantir’s Business Use Cases & Philosophy:
At a previous World Economic Forum event, Dr Alex Karp was very vocal about his mission for Palantir, and certain use cases of the company.
Palantir is a data integration platform dedicated towards solving the hardest issues within society, said Dr Karp CEO of Palantir Technologies. Karp mentions how this includes, fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties. However, the idea of terrorism is broadly defined said Alex Karp, stating how Palantir can aid within stopping cyber-attacks and halting viruses from attacking broad populations.
The basic idea for Palantir was to “extend the full mind into an enterprise”. Karp stated how, when he was going into large enterprises, there was not only one dataset, however instead, there was 5, 10 or 50 datasets internally. Palantir, he said, have found the solution in terms of integration of these data-sets, as well as protecting civil liberties at the same time. Karp proudly mentioned how, the work with the Deli Lama is well known for Palantir. Alex proclaimed how, “we protect cyber-fraud and we protect civil liberties in Governments.”
Alex Karp interestingly said, we at Palantir, “have more growth in these markets than what we can ever satisfy.” Palantir’s CEO stated that as a company, there is a sole focus on solving real world issues, and making a society a better place for all of us. This interlinks with the whole organisational culture for Palantir, in which is focused on solving the most existential issues within society.
″The core mission of our company always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world, the strongest it’s ever been, for the sake of global peace and prosperity, and we feel like this year we really showed what that would mean,” Karp said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
After previously coming under criticism by political parties, Karp hit back at critics who stated the company proceeded with unethical activities associated with border control. “We started this contract under Obama, and obviously there’s a lot of legitimate concern about what happens on our border, how it happens, and what does the enforcement look like?”
“It’s a legitimate, complex issue. My personal position is we acknowledge the complexity. The people protesting, whom I respect, should also acknowledge that complexity.” Furthermore, Alex went on ot mention how, his “house has been protested for many months, almost every day,” Karp said. “Our offices have been protested. Many Palantirians, who do not just follow what I say but are critical people, protested against it internally. Some people were so upset by it that they left. These are very hard decisions. I respect the people that that have decided they can’t be involved in this, but we have a position.”
“It’s commonly known that our software is used in an operational context at war,” Karp said. “Do you really think a war fighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial with their life? Currently, when you’re a war fighter your life depends on your software.”
Peter Thiel On World Economic Forum:
Peter Thiel stated recently how he was incredibly pessimistic in regards to the World Economic Forum Event. Furthermore, Peter said how, “people were there only in their capacity as representatives of corporations or governments or NFO’s. It really hit me – there was simply no individuals in the room”.
The billionaire mentioned how, Davos aims to become a larger world-wide Government, in which individuals become representatives for a set mission. “Davos is not a truth seeking place”, in which we can have efficient debate. Peter said, he does not like Davos in terms of the inability to have any dissenting views. Until we are at the end of the world, alternative views must be apparent within society, said the Palantir Co-Founder.
Cybersecurity Outlook:
Whilst Palantir is not a sole cyber security product, the OS does have clear benefits within the context of cyber security. Within the Global Cybersecurity Outlook talk, Karen Tso, Chander Prakash Gurnani, Jürgen Stock, Josephine Teo and Robert M. Lee all spoke about cybersecurity, and the overall connectedness the world currently is experiencing.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook report indicates that cyberattacks increased 125% globally in 2021, with evidence suggesting a continued uptick through 2022. In this fast-changing landscape it is vital for leaders to take a strategic approach to cyber risks.
Jürgen Stock mentioned how, often there is a decentralised methodological approach when it comes to cyber-attacks within the modern day. Stock said how, unlike the traditional “Mafia-like” approach, instead this new wave of cyber-criminals connect within a distributed, and decentralised manner in which can create friction when law enforcement agencies are trying to solve the situation. Furthermore, this is becoming more difficult to prevent and stop, said Stock. Often however, human failure is the main reason as to why criminals can easily attack systems within organisations and Governments. To add, as the world is becoming more interconnected, the challenge is “how can one connect the dots in which need to be connected”, however also maintain security simultaneously.
Stock said, often within the cybersecurity field, tools that are used by Governments and military organisations, sometimes can end-up settling within the hands of criminals via the dark-web. This shows how state wide attacks are becoming more common, as well as the overall sophistication of digitalised attacks.
Josephine Teo mentioned that in regards to Singapore, there is a growing necessity to ensure that the world is more prepared for cyber-attacks. Teo went on to say how there is one key trend, namely the sophistication of cyber-criminals, and the fact that these criminals are “catching up”. One problem we face is that, attacks are growing at an exponential speed, whilst also being funded majorly via underground criminals.
Teo spoke in regards to the overall weaknesses of the West, and how often there is limited sophistication when looking at software solutions for companies. “This is a long standing problem, that is not going away any time soon.”
Robert M. Lee is the founder and CEO at Dragos Inc. an industrial cybersecurity company. Lee spoke at the cybersecurity event at the World Economic Forum and said how, organisations are operating on a “knifes-edge”. Lee mentioned that, adversaries know how to target operations systems and companies are now more interconnected than ever before. When looking at the Russian situation, companies in which have involvement with Ukraine have show to be targeted far more within recent periods.
Lee concluded how there is a clear overlay between geopolitical events, and the attacks on organisations.
Palantir’s Involvement Within Cybersecurity:
Whilst it can be stated that Palantir is not specifically a Cyber-Security company, the software does provide solutions within this field. Palantir Cyber can be described as an End-To-End Cyber Intelligence Platform For Analysis and Knowledge Management.
At the foundation of Palantir Cyber are three unique capabilities that enable analysts to investigate the origins and features of cyber attacks and devise highly tailored responses. With Palantir Cyber, enterprises move beyond using simple black-box, automated detection systems. Palantir allows organizations to diagnose attacks and take pre-emptive action against future cyber threats.
Using Palantir’s Hercules technology, enterprises build and iterate on strategic algorithms to comb through data archives and detect anomalies by creating clusters that reveal previously unknown entities, events, and connections. The resulting clusters are ranked by relevance and presented to the user along with other visualizations such as risk scores, pie charts, and heat maps. An analyst can triage these clusters and then drill down on a particular anomaly and investigate it further,
continually modifying the algorithm as new information emerges.
Recognizing that commercial institutions face a shared set of cyber threats, Palantir created the Cyber Mesh, a platform for secure information sharing among peers. Drawing on successful models within the defense and intelligence communities, the Cyber Mesh enables secure peer-to-peer sharing between enterprises with automatic redaction of sensitive data.
A centrally hosted Palantir instance provides out-of-the-box cyber intelligence feeds, rolled up from suspicious activity patterns, third-party open source and licensed data feeds, and contextual data feeds. By letting organizations leverage the subject matter expertise of Palantir engineers and insights from peer institutions, the Mesh provides immense analytic value over automated black box solutions.
Holistically, the Cyber Security conference at the World Economic Forum event has shown the innate weaknesses of the West, and how companies such as Palantir can aid Governments and commercial clients when trying to strengthen their software solutions.
In consideration of the total up rise within nation-state attacks, the importance of a holistic OS could not be more overemphasised.
