Al Vigier: Canada's AI strategy shouldn't include secret Palantir bills

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Canada and domestic product simply not possible The only two countries who can run domestic products of this kind are USA and China . The rest is just gimmick or a lie.
  by maxdo
• Palantir's software stack is not really that complex, and their FDE workforce is famously... undereducated. Canada should be able to pull it off, there's much to improve on.
  by bigyabai
• Palantir is giving me "Samaritan" vibes from the show: "Person of Interest".

  For the ones who haven't watched this amazing show, here is a small Google AI summary:

  Samaritan is the primary antagonist of the later seasons of the sci-fi series Person of Interest. It is a fictional, totalitarian artificial superintelligence created by Arthur Claypool. Unlike its counterpart, the Machine, Samaritan has no moral constraints, viewing human free will as a flaw requiring aggressive control and mass surveillance

  by freakynit
• What a title. I misread and thought an "AI Vigier" was an official tasked with being vigilant about AI.
  by userbinator
• The sovereign initiative in Canada is laughable, most if not all critical infrastructure are 100% relying on US cloud products, from the usuals like MS and google all the way to cybersecurity and other products, and we are not even talking about supply chains and the likes. So practically speaking, the US can in a click, turn off Canada’s grid and banking, in minutes without a single bullet, the country will collapse. That’s why whenever I see all that buzz words of “sovereign xyz” I know it’s a just a way to funnel tax money back to some companies or programs, without having so much questions about it.
  by tamimio
• Step by step we need to de-Americanize, for sure. Can’t just happen overnight.
  by Waterluvian
• Canada and Europe call for banning American companies in their the name of sovereignty: upvoted and praised as necessary

  America tries that for valid reasons (unfair subsidies, human or labor rights violations, BYD): get called fascist or stupid

  by thesmtsolver2
• Canada and Europe call for banning American companies in their the name of America Threatening to go apeshit and do stupid stuff: upvoted and praised as necessary.

  America tries that for stupid xenophobic reasons, gets called stupid or xenophobic.

  by protocolture
• The idea we're going to stop people like special forces and intelligence buying the software they want to run on on prem, air gapped stacks that they control in the name of sovereignty is silly.
  by crimsoneer
• Wtf does Palantir have to do with AI. Nobody at Palantir can train an LLM from scratch or even fine tune.
  by another_twist
• I don't think the Canadian government is dropping a big contract on a company that is 24 months old vs one 24 years old, more or less.
  by nickdothutton
• I mean no public strategy should include secret bills, Palantir or no Palantir.

  If you're idealogically opposed to Palantir, how will a home-grown Palantir help? It would likely do the same things Palantir does but with a Canadian Alex Karp

  by altmanaltman
• There likely isn't a Canadian Alex Karp. Karp is a unique byproduct of American culture. The specific brand of arrogance, hunger for war, and callous disregard for human life, all in service of a right wing ideological project, is simply not as present in Canada because Canada is a middle power with more liberal values who prefer diplomacy over war.
  by dreambuffer
• Well there's a clear difference between a creepy company spying on you and a creepy company closely aligned with a government that has threatened to annex you spying on you.

  Neither are great, but one is worse.

  by gpm
• Instead, buy domestic product, and out in the open.
  by ClearwayLaw
• Better yet, build a domestic product for government use and tightly regulate and oversee it so that you can be sure it's being used lawfully, only when needed for government use, and only when necessary. Democratic nations have power over their government but not over corporations. I know which one I'd rather have ruling over me and spying on my every move.
  by autoexec
• Canada shouldn't include Palantir at all.
  by jschrf
• Why not?
  by gatvol
• I don’t know the specifics of this case, but in Canada, calls like this (all wrapped up in the flag), usually come from Canadian companies hoping for some sort of sole sourced contract that they have no business getting.

  So so perhaps we should be excluding American companies at this time, but in the name of competition and openness, we should allow bids from our real allies, such as the Europeans or the Asians.

  by tomComb
• Excluding China, I hope.
  by soupbowl
• "America or not" is a red herring. Palantir is the specific problem.

  The kind of people running these companies don't have true allegiance to anything but their own objectives. If necessary, they'd move all operations to Europe or East Asia in a month, and you'd have "Palantir 2" under a different name with no better ethics or privacy.

  Increased emphasis has to be on running things domestically with on-premises hardware. As long as the vendor is elsewhere and not subject to oversight, the risks remain.

  by ronsor
• I don't think there's a government in the world, including the US, that should allow Palantir anywhere near their data or systems. I consider Palantir a national security threat. I also feel this way about McKinsey (and Bain, BCG, etc).

  I also think any form of platform AI usage to be a national security threat in the absence of stringent controls over that data and the platform. At some point I think governments and companies will wake up to this and demand local LLMs or, in the very least, a cloud platform within their jurisdiction, ownership and control.

  The 1980s and 1990s ushered in this idea of "small government", privatization and public-private partnerships that I think was a huge mistake with catastrophic consequences. It's simply letting the foxes into the hen house. It leads to regulatory capture, a revolving door and a massive government-to-private wealth transfer.

  What's funny is that a lot of this stems from a now throughly debunked idea of the "tragedy of the commons" [1].

  [1]: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/03...

  by jmyeet