Decoding Palantir, the Most Mysterious Company in Silicon Valley
This week on Uncanny Valley, we talk about one of the most notorious American corporations. So what does Palantir actually do?
This week on Uncanny Valley, we talk about one of the most notorious American corporations. So what does Palantir actually do?
When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It’s very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth’s company. But…
Mobile World Congress, better known as MWC, is an annual trade show in Barcelona, where many of the major players in mobile get together to unveil new devices, announce services, and make deals. It’s no longer the central hub of all the latest and greatest smartphone announcements as it used to be, but there were…
The US government has been imposing similar export controls on China aimed at limiting its ability to mint advanced silicon for years, but the controls apparently didn’t stop Huawei from developing competitive chips for training large AI models. The Chinese tech giant, which was temporarily crippled by US sanctions half a decade ago, sent samples…
Many pieces of AI-generated content were used to express support for or fandom of certain candidates. For instance, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the BeeGees song “Stayin’ Alive” was shared millions of times on social media, including by Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican. “It’s all about social signaling….
Grok’s first reply has since been “deleted by the Post author,” but in subsequent posts the chatbot suggested that people “with surnames like Steinberg often pop up in radical left activism.” “Elon’s recent tweaks just dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate,” Grok…
For many of the people served by the humanitarian sector, 2024 has been the worst of times. The most recent UN estimates of those forced to flee violence and disaster is a record of 120 million, a figure that has doubled in the past decade. The broader figure of those in humanitarian need, 300 million…