Palantir's FDE label spreads as AWS and Microsoft build embedded AI teams

The Register reported on 3 October that the term has become the industry's latest fad. It quoted Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at SHI, who said: "We have been doing FDE for a long time." The outlet describes SHI as a $16 billion global solutions integrator.

The label has a specific origin. Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar says he coined it in 2007. He did so after a conversation with CEO Alex Karp about why French restaurants are so good. Sankar recounted the exchange on his personal Substack, and The Register cited it. Karp's answer was that the wait staff are part of the kitchen staff, and he asked Sankar to build that for engineering.

What the role actually involves: sending senior consultants to a client without tying them to a fixed project. The mission is to build something valuable using new technology, with wide latitude to do it quickly. Sankar wrote that FDEs "embed alongside our customers and work to ensure our software solves their problem and not some proxy for their problem." He added that they are "crazy enough to get on a last-minute plane to Iraq" and "smart enough to ship quality, same-day code."

Sankar also said Palantir's investors thought FDEs were a bad idea. The costs ate into margins. His argument for keeping them is that customers end up understanding the product.

The money behind the trend is not small. According to The Register, AWS announced a dedicated FDE organisation in June with $1 billion to fund it. Microsoft made its own move in July.

Old practice, new name

DoiT is an AI and cloud cost management company. It told The Register it has used FDEs since 2011 but only adopted the term in the last quarter of 2025. That was when it renamed its "Customer Reliability Engineering" practice. That is the pattern across the industry: the work predates the label, and the label is what changed.

Smaller shops are part of the same wave. A blog post published on 3 October by Jared Palmer argues that only about 5,000 elite software engineers exist worldwide. He reaches that figure through Price's law. That is the observation from Derek de Solla Price's 1963 book Little Science, Big Science that half the papers in a field are written by the square root of the number of authors. Palmer applies the square root to estimates of 20 million to 27 million developers, getting roughly 4,500 to 5,200.

He is careful about the claim: "Price's law says the square root does half the work, not all of it," he writes. The number is explicitly a guess. Still, the argument that a small group writes the code everyone else builds on is the same scarcity logic that sells embedded consulting.

Practical questions surface elsewhere

The rest of the week's engineering coverage was less about org charts and more about the awkward edges of tooling. Tom's Hardware reported on 3 October that a gamer in Germany bought a used AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D on 21 September 2026. He was banned from Valorant on first launch. Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat had blacklisted the CPU on 12 August 2026 over its previous owner's cheating. Riot's anti-cheat specialist Phillip Koskinas said on X that hardware bans last a maximum of four months and are game-specific, per the outlet.

"Everything else from my system is now also on the blacklist," the buyer, posting as u/After-Cartoonist-196, said, according to Tom's Hardware.

Tom's Hardware notes that some anti-cheat engines enforce permanent bans while others have an expiration date. Buyers have no way to check for violations before purchase.

On the model-serving side, a post published on 3 October on carteakey.dev describes running a 125B-parameter Qwen model on a single RTX 4070 with 12GB of memory. The author reports llama.cpp reaching 27 tokens per second on the setup. A narrower runtime called Strata hit 53.2 tokens per second with 60,000 tokens of context. He concedes the two runs used different quantisations and settings. So it is a comparison of complete serving setups rather than a controlled experiment. He bets that by April 2027 at least four of six narrow engines will have gone 60 days without a commit.

Capcom used its own conference on 2 October to set out plans for its RE Engine. IGN reported that programmer Satoshi Ishida presented the REX project. It will improve the engine incrementally rather than replace it, and one goal is an "AI generation game engine." IGN cited GameBiz for the detail that REX unifies the engine under what it called the world's most common programming language. That makes it easier for humans and AI to work with. Capcom said at a March 2026 shareholders meeting that it will not put AI-generated assets into its games but will use AI to improve development efficiency.

Learning material and long shots

Free training material keeps appearing alongside the tooling. A site called AI Engineering from Scratch, maintained by Rohit Ghumare, lists a curriculum taught in Python, TypeScript, Rust and Julia. It builds every algorithm from raw maths before any framework is imported, and claims readers at Apple, Google, Meta, OpenAI and Nvidia. Another post, published on 3 October, argues that coding agents should be managed with ideas borrowed from chemical engineering. It uses the game Shapez 2 to explain unit operations and throughput.

Not every story this week involves software at all. Purdue University said on 28 September that the Archaeological Legacy Institute and the Purdue Research Foundation will sail for Nikumaroro in Kiribati. They depart by sea on 7 October after meeting in Tarawa on 6 October. The team will inspect a satellite anomaly called the Taraia Object for signs of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10-E. It is due back around 22 October. Separately, The War Zone published an interview on 3 October with Tim Conners, a former lead propulsion engineer on NASA's Blackbird programme. The topic was speculation that NASA is preparing to fly SR-71 Tail 844 again.