Very special Training Data drops today: Making Cities Awesome ☺️ We haven’t featured an application company on Training Data in a while. The…

Very special Training Data drops today: Making Cities Awesome ☺️ We haven’t featured an application company on Training Data in a while. The diffusion of AI is the Most Important Thing, and the highest-stakes application category of all is the one sitting near the base of Maslow’s hierarchy: safety. Today I am excited to bring Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph of Peregrine onto the podcast. You may not have heard of Peregrine yet, but their technology is almost certainly keeping you and your loved ones safe, and they are rejecting the surveillance state while doing it. Nick and Ben talk about all the interesting ways that AI is being deployed in customer environments at Peregrine, which include some of the coolest use cases of long-horizon agents and vibe coding that I’ve seen: * a cold-case agent that reproduced an exoneration detectives had reached by hand * a Wisconsin county that placed a suspect using cell records buried in 300GB of evidence * a semantic search tool for identifying active threats to a synagogue * a vibe-coded hurricane simulator to help one Forward Deployed Engineer root-cause an inflection in weather-related incidents Nick formerly ran Palantir’s Special Operations Command business unit and deployed into high-stakes situations in the Middle East. Ben comes from almost the opposite background: building humanitarian technology for refugees and disease prevention in Africa and India. But the two of them converged on a similar thesis: that this technology could be used to make cities work better for the people who live in them. Today, Peregrine powers law enforcement, emergency medical services, fire and rescue, and other services in more than 400 communities globally. Public distrust in surveillance has reached a boiling point, for good reason. Other public safety technology companies grow by collecting more data. Peregrine inverted the model: no sensors, no new data, a business built on connecting the data and information cities already own, with permissions, policy and auditability from day one. Authorized users make sense of existing data when they have a legitimate reason to access it, and not otherwise. Data governance, access controls and audit logs are unglamorous work, but they are the safeguards that let a city protect safety and privacy at once. Nick and Ben’s deep integrity shines through in the episode. I am thankful for their stewardship of this critically important category. 00:00 Introduction 02:07 What Forward Deployed Engineering Means 03:58 What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong 05:23 Humanitarian Work, Refugee Work, And Downstream Data Problems 08:25 Why Cities, Why Safety 10:45 Two Dozen Nos And San Pablo PD 14:19 Building Through Defund The Police 18:16 The Inversion Of The Collection Model 21:20 Data Ownership And Governance 22:57 From Nice Search To Deep Analysis 29:59 Agents Writing The Integrations 31:45 The Cold Case Agent 35:02 The Anti-Network-Effect Proposition 38:40 Facial Recognition And Hard Decisions 40:48 Technology For The Underdogs 42:54 Trusting The Individual Contributor 48:50 Ten Thousand Cities Media

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Source: Sonya Huang (X) | 2026-09-01