Ontologize & The American Tech Fellowship

Ontologize is helping Palantir launch The American Tech Fellowship. Its goals are worthy and important for the United States.

If it succeeds, it will equip hardworking Americans with applied AI skills that are in high demand by companies big and small.

If you are a software engineer in the US who knows you have what it takes to succeed with AI, who believes in the future of American industry, but who struggles to find a job — I encourage you to apply to this fellowship.

And if you’re an organization looking to hire Forward Deployed Engineers trained on Palantir AIP, get in touch via the email in my profile.

If you want to hear why I’m dedicating Ontologize resources to this initiative, read on.

The American Tech Fellowship isn’t just a training program.

It seeks to change corporate culture in our country, especially at the executive level. This is how the ATF can have a lasting impact. Or, as Shyam says in his blog post, it’s how we can “prove a point”.

When I was an FDE at Palantir, I witnessed two common pathologies across a broad swath of corporate America.

First, executives made short-term-lucrative but long-term-destructive decisions based on a hyper-financialization of their organizations. We saw this in the fall of American giants like Boeing and GE.

From my vantage point specifically, I repeatedly saw an unwillingness to invest in enabling in-house technical expertise. Instead, I saw an embrace of outsourcing because cost reductions were more legible than talent cultivation. Even though this hollowed-out the organization’s own ability to compete in the market.

Second — and this goes hand-in-hand with the first point — executives often dismissed the potential of their own people. Particularly the workers who were furthest from the c-suite but closest to the enterprise’s day-to-day realities.

Those employees’ ability to make informed judgement calls aligned with strategic intent was restricted; they were not incentivized to outperform in ways that would disrupt the status quo; as a class they were not treated as worthy of ongoing professional investment.

And, for what it’s worth, I’ve seen many unions reciprocating this treatment as exemplified by a widespread conservatism regarding technology broadly and AI specifically.

Speaking for no one but me, the point I want to drive home with the American Tech Fellowship is:

• that American workers have what it takes to learn how to apply AI tech to buoy our industrial base;

• that they deserve a chance to learn this new tech and they must be afforded latitude to apply it to problems in unforeseen ways, especially when those solutions deviate from what corporate leadership may have predicted;

• that the traditional markers of pedigree are weak signals for who can be entrusted with owning important outcomes — we are in a transition and we will all be best served by giving more people a chance to prove themselves

More tangible and personally fulfilling than making a statement is, of course, helping people get better jobs and helping organizations support those folks in doing great work with AI.

The American Tech Fellowship is just starting, and I’m excited by its potential. Tomorrow, I’ll share more details about what the experience will be like for fellows who join.

P.S. The American Tech Fellowship is free to participants!