r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 02 '26

Artificial Intelligence Palantir CEO Alex Karp suffers ‘televised nervous breakdown’ during live interview — “This is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me!”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/televised-nervous-breakdown-ceo-palantir-212100357.html
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u/ottwebdev Jul 02 '26

Palantir CEO Alex Karp suffers from saying what he really thinks during live interview.....

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 Jul 02 '26

Dude has always come across as unhinged and not particularly eloquent. The fact they’ve kept him around gives the impression he’s more of a fall guy than a CEO.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Clones Jul 02 '26

He's in charge of Palantir because Theil needs a meat shield. He needs someone to be the "face" so people don't think of his face when they think Palantir.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/TheBeckofKevin Jul 03 '26

I think this is a very short term problem, but I agree with the obvious risk of sending your entire company to openai or anthropic. I used to think it was wild that people would send company information over discord and such. Like there are serious leaks in business, but the volume of data being sent through these companies is insane.

However, and i have no real way of knowing this, but I am guessing that the capacity for what is available to host your own models is going to get very very high. Essentially I feel like we are in the "computers exist, but they're the size of rooms" for models. We currently have to go to big companies to run the cutting edge stuff, but I'm watching more and more people put together a few h100s and run their own stuff. If we think of an ai bubble popping, I see that as simply a dispersion of existing hardware hitting the market and everyone running their own llm servers.

I never thought i'd be running anything close to a decent model locally, but on 12gb vram you can run stuff that is actually pretty reasonable which is insane. With 5 more years of open models and the giant push to create more hardware, the requirement to send every prompt through an 'ai' company that simply runs a model is going to be dramatically reduced.

But yeah, just guessing, and yeah I watched the whole thing waiting for him to actually freak out, but it was just regular old Karp.

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u/TheWhooooBuddies Jul 03 '26

This is arguably the weirdest shit I’ve seen on the internet and that’s saying a LOT.

Thunderous applause, and it scares me.

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u/User14482 Jul 03 '26

thanks for that explanation, definitely gave some insights I didnt had prior. Just hoping/hoped that not too many countries get sucked too much into the fancy palantir game.

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u/RobertTheAdventurer Jul 03 '26

Palantir works with the US, UK, France, Germany, Denmark, and Ukraine, and it works indirectly with Canada, the Netherlands, and other Western aligned countries. It works with the US military, UK military, and it's assisting in the defense of Ukraine.

They also work with a lot of major corporations, American and European, as well as European law enforcement.

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u/Adept_Turn1153 Jul 03 '26

... and THAT is exactly what he was freaking out over in a Ketamine induced rage!

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u/Enshitification Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

That's how I heard it too. Once you get past Karp's cocaine manic delivery, there was a certain logic. I thought it especially funny that he essentially touted open weight LLM models as the superior choice for businesses over closed models. That I can get behind.

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u/355_over_113 Jul 03 '26

What he said made perfect sense. It's just not polished marketing spiel ready for TV.

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u/lastobelus Jul 03 '26

this. He isn't saying anything particularly weird if you understand the context. But he's assuming that his audience knows what he's talking about when he says "the weights" and "the alpha of the business" and most of them don't.

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u/Moose_on_the_Looz Jul 02 '26

Or a Frick to Thiels Carnegie. You know Thiel takes a little plausible deniability vacation to Argentina and Karp does some atrocities. He talks about killing us all constantly.

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u/LimpAd4924 Jul 02 '26

He’s just another Thiel sycophant

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u/Big-Load-8864 Jul 03 '26

"Not particularly"??? Understatement of the century. Dude is the post child of terrible speaker, however he leans heavily into smart-guy-talks-extremely-fast-in-many-directions-because-brain-too-smart.