AI-Powered Insight for Mission-Critical Operations

(Automated transcription)

Shyam Sankar: 

We are facing grave threats as the West. As we look at an axis of countries coming together to threaten liberal Western democratic order here, we need to mobilize all of American industry against this, and it is going to be crucial to leverage American modern software technologies to win this fight. At Palantir, over 20 years, we had to create a whole bunch of software infrastructure that simply allowed us to get to the starting line. As a company, we’ve always been focused on serving the war fighters’ needs, working backwards as quickly as possible from what the field needs. We need to work back from what is going to help our nation actually win, and that requires all of the defense tech ecosystem, from new entrants to legacy primes, to collaborate to actually deliver these capabilities at the speed of relevance.

Jim Rebesco: 

Our partnership with Palantir is really nothing less than a real paradigm shift in how artificial intelligence is built, deployed, and leveraged within the national security space. Our mission at Striveworks is to disappear MLOps, meaning that we want it to be a safe, easy, and effective way for users to be able to deploy AI/ML models that actually work in their operating environments and for their missions. And in the national security space, the way to make artificial intelligence actually relevant and actually usable is to decrease your cycle time. 

There’s a ton of challenges that startups face when they want to build software and deploy it into the environment to support a government customer. Our users need a ton of freedom. They need latitude to be able to build and adapt models rapidly to the operational conditions that they’re seeing. There’s a lot of data, there’s a lot of decisions, and not a lot of time, so how do we focus human beings on those most critical and most impactful decisions? Palantir is enabling us to give users the flexibility to build the models that they need to and deploy them, while at the same time ensuring that the data governance and ontology is common and shared across all of those model builders and the consumers that are using those models. 

The Striveworks partnership with Palantir has enabled us to deliver capability to our customers in two really big ways. The first one is just simply getting our software in the hands of our customers in a timely and efficient manner. Leveraging Rubix, we are able to take our platform and use a common set of infrastructure and common set of services across a wide range of deployment environments. When I pair that with Apollo, I’ve now got a data ontology and a data framework.

The second way that the Striveworks partnership with Palantir has been really invaluable is that we’re making the model an invisible part that enables end users to make decisions. Using Palantir’s user-centric machine learnings, we’re able to get inferences in front of operational end users. They’re able to use those inferences in their day-to-day actions, and we’re able to collect the feedback on how those inferences are performing and pipe them right back to retrain and redeploy models. Not only do you have end users, soldiers, sailors, and airmen building their own models, deploying their own models, but now you’re ensuring that those models don’t make the same mistake twice, even in a rapidly evolving environment. Model builders and data points are able to compete on a frame-by-frame, second-by-second, data point–by–data point basis, and that kind of connection between data and model is driving impact and it’s driving outcomes.

Shyam Sankar: 

Striveworks is exactly the sort of American innovator that we want to see succeed here: a group of computer scientists who cut their teeth helping Wall Street with high-frequency trading and now helping our special operations community and broader defense ecosystem find high-value targets. It’s no secret that for many years in the special operations community, Striveworks and Palantir competed against each other, and I’m much more excited about a configuration where I can be software infrastructure that really helps Striveworks achieve great mission successes for their customers. We need in this moment to recognize that there are massive challenges facing our nation and that we’re going to only solve it by coming together as industry, as government, united in purpose and effort.