Anybody could understand the difference between data engineering and "AI" in 30 mins of research, which is a lot less time than they have to research a story. Whenever a journalist "doesn't understand" something that could be learned with a simple google search, it's not stupidity, it's malicious. In this case the journalist is pretending to write a story about Palantir winning a contract, but really writing a part of the continuing story "Palantir (and the tech industry in general) is evil and powerful and you should be scared."
Rather the continuing story "Palantir is an extremely competent, extremely advanced company from the future that spreads secret sauce on data that can turn it into fuel for their mind control technologies" that Palantir and the people who direct contracts to them propagate themselves.
This is just another case of journalists responding to tech companies own PR because they entirely operate from press releases and marketing material. See Cambridge Analytics.
Anybody could understand the difference between data engineering and "AI" in 30 mins of research, which is a lot less time than they have to research a story. Whenever a journalist "doesn't understand" something that could be learned with a simple google search, it's not stupidity, it's malicious. In this case the journalist is pretending to write a story about Palantir winning a contract, but really writing a part of the continuing story "Palantir (and the tech industry in general) is evil and powerful and you should be scared."