I wonder what's next. I suspect one interesting endpoint is that the excel model becomes the quantitative surface of a much deeper research graph / self-constructing ontology. I could imagine something like every quantitative revenue key driver being hyperlinked to a graph of the intermediate qualitative assumptions that underpin it. Maybe analysts use some kind of ambient capture during their desktop and field research process, and then there's an agent-mediated live evidence stream (e.g, expert calls, filings, transcripts, podcasts, articles, tweets, etc.) that supports or contradicts the analyst's assumptions in real time. And based on that you could calibrate your confidence about various qualitative assumptions at any given point (as new evidence comes in) and the model could compute how that flows through to quantitative KDs. Overtime, this surface / system would learn how new evidence shifts your priors and how accurately your updates actually end up representing economic reality. It could then start to understand how to weight different pieces of qualitative evidence! Lots to think about.

Progress in technology is all about breaking false tradeoffs. Palantir, has been forged, from the beginning, to help critical institutions leverage the accelerating power of digital computation without sacrificing their sovereignty or the sovereignty of their constituents. This was prescient and is more important than ever. As, today, some in Silicon Valley believe "commoditizing your complement" means commoditizing institutions and humanity itself. In some sense, the effective accelerationists of Silicon Valley believe technology is God and the effective altruists believe they are God. The former believe that sufficiently powerful technology will automatically organize society in the way that threads the needle between the Antichrist and Armageddon, and the latter believe they are the only ones capable of creating technology and organizing society in a way that threads that needle—convienently, according to their own utility function! The AI successionists don’t even care whether we thread that needle at all. Palantir gives us a different option: technology as an unapologetic accelerant of human curiosity and agency, yes, but also of institutional fitness. In this view, we don't have to surrender our economic sovereignty to an all-knowing model, nor cede our moral authority to the unelected engineers in SF and the well-meaning, but generally histrionic “philosophers” in Berkeley who built it. Instead, we can use ever-more powerful computation to make the pro-human institutions we select (through free markets and the democratic process), and therefore our society, radically more capable and resilient.

Thiel Fellowship is in a league of its own. Peter Thiel is pretty hard to replicate as an eval / verifier, and these programs really are only as good as their verifiers (and the positive selection effects they confer).