I cannot comment specifically on CHEETAS, but what I can say is that USG developing in house software solutions almost always produces a disastrous product that goes over budget and has extreme maintenance overhead.
To see why, you can simply ask yourself: do you think that the unelected officials overseeing government agencies that embark on enterprise software development projects have sufficient expertise and enterprise software project management experience to be able to do this well?
Furthermore, do you think that the quality of engineers that the NHS or DoD can attract with less than half of the compensation of an actual software company stands a chance at developing something good in house?
It’s unfortunately almost impossible for these projects to go right.
CHEETAS isn't really developed in house though; it's mainly developed by Dell. Certainly the leadership is USG-associated, but I think the leadership is actually really good. Unfortunately I seem to be unable to get _real_ access to CHEETAS and finding anyone who has worked with it is a challenge.
I suspect underneath it's mostly Hadoop but it's impossible to separate the roadmap from the implementation without getting my hands on it.
That experience speaks more to the perils of in-housing, not to why Palantir is the best COTS for specific needs here. Are there specific leading COTS here you view it so far ahead of for such a contract?
Closer to our own practice.. Modern LLMs have basically reset the field for SOTA in this space, with Palantir, by definition, being behind OpenAI in the most basic tasks, and thus being in the same race as everyone else to retool. Speaking from our own USG experience, we are deep tech leads in some other intelligence areas (graph, ...), and before OpenAI, often chose to adopt prev-gen leading LLM models (BERT, ...) for tasks closer to the NLP side as we recognized that wasn't where our deep tech had an inhouse advantage. We basically had to start over on some of those projects there as soon as GPT4 came out because it just changed so much that the incumbent advantages of already being delivering on a contract were a dead end for core functionality, and almost a year later, it's now obvious that it was the right choice when we get compared to companies that haven't been. Palantir has been publicly resetting as well for using GenAI era tech, which suggests the same situation.
It seems like you don’t know what Palantir is. Nothing OpenAI does is competitive with what Palantir does. Palantir, like every other software company out there, is exploring what “my product + AI” means.
They are using palantir foundry, which is palantir's big data platform, or how they call it: "The Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise"
It varies by agency — either something built in house (very bad) or built by a company that knows how to acquire government contracts, of which there are few - the set of which frankly always has worse tech than Palantir. If product efficacy is not absolutely critical, the acquisition process will be driven by nepotism or other forms of corruption.
As an example for the second case in DoD space, there’s Advana.
That is sweetly naive, unless you are talking about their marketing department