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Posted by leading-AI 4 hours ago

Palantir's secret weapon isn't AI – it's Ontology. An open-source deep dive(github.com)
66 points | 43 commentspage 2
modeless 2 hours ago||
> isn't X – it's Y

What is this AI slop doing at the top of HN? Come on, you don't even have to click through to know it's slop! It even has an en dash right in the title!

gaigalas 4 hours ago||
> 2-1. Modeling the Data World with "Nouns" and "Verbs"

> Link type: The relationships between object types, supporting 1-to-1, 1-to-many, and many-to-many relationships.

Seems incredibly naive in terms of symbolic representation of knowledge. Maybe I spent too much time with OWL.

HillRat 4 hours ago||
I find myself distinctly unimpressed by the idea that slapping a nice UI and some TS/SCI controls on top of a graph database — the latter being something that NSA did, with considerably more sophistication, years prior in a Neo4J fork — is some kind of brilliant conceptual moat. Graph DBs are useful for certain kinds of problems, which happen to map well to counterterror social mapping strategies, this is nothing particularly new or noteworthy.
CGMthrowaway 4 hours ago||
Can you say more? What is state of the art?
gaigalas 3 hours ago||
I've learned this stuff as a hobby, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm not a specialist.

OWL 1, for example, has stuff like transitive properties (the classical example is A ancestorOf B, B ancestorOf C, therefore I can infer A ancestorOf C if I annotate ancestorOf as a transitive property).

Union, equivalence, inversion, symmetries, cardinality. Those are all possible to represent symbolic in OWL ontologies.

They're also neatly separated in different types (OWL Lite, OWL DL, OWL Full). OWL Lite and DL for example are proven to be decidable (you won't get some halt when doing inference, no matter what).

I know there are plenty of database engines to store triples and graphs, and plenty of reasoners out there.

I haven't studied OWL 2 yet or newer stuff like SHACL, but I know it's supposed to be even better.

mannyv 2 hours ago||
I worked at a company where the VPs etc spewed the word "ontology" all the time. We were never sure if they knew they were spewing bullshit or they really believed what they were saying was real.

Ontology is one of those fancy words that sounds important but is basically, as another poster pointed out, a standardized vocabulary.

measurablefunc 4 hours ago||
And my secret is epistemology. AMA.
WaitWaitWha 3 hours ago|
mine is axiology, DNAMA. ;)
bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago||
well my MA said my DNA is secret.
rramadass 3 hours ago||
Palantir is just "Cambridge Analytica" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Their ethical/moral stance i will leave it to you to infer.

Watch these old presentations by CA's then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo (note the Q/A at the end here)

Also watch this interview with Christopher Wylie the CA whistleblower and again extrapolate to today's AI world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M

Be afraid, Be very afraid.

m00dy 3 hours ago||
is it accurate ?
SilverElfin 3 hours ago||
It’s just a consulting firm with connections to the Trump administration through Thiel. That’s why they need forward engineers. It’s not a real platform. Ontology is as far as I can tell, a marketing buzzword, mostly repeated by bots to pump Palantir.
gigatexal 2 hours ago||
Eccentric CEO (we already have Elon another is one too many …) wildly overpriced stock and company and also one without any ethics that’s super close to the Trump admin … I for one am praying this company collapses. I’d love to read a HN post about how they go chapter 11 and leave the public eye.
shablulman 4 hours ago|
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