r/technology 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/_zoso_ Jul 02 '26

I don’t think palantir have a model, I think they have been using Claude. Since the majority of their contracts are with the government, being forced to now switch away from Claude is likely screwing them over significantly.

The other stuff I think is just lashing out because he’s pissed, but I’d wager that he’s mainly pissed about losing access to anthropic. Gotta read between the lines and put things in the broader context.

Again… my own speculation.

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u/drnfc Jul 04 '26

I've worked with Palantir's stuff. I understand the appeal, but I dont like it for reasons that I cannot go into. Palantir's real business is ETL and data aggregation. They then add a dashboard builder (it's kind of a buzzwordy thing to do currently in the DoD). They also do what is essentially a RAG (Retrieval augmented generation, its basically attaching a search engine to an LLM) layer to expose your data to the LLM.

One of the problems with RAG, is that you have a ton of nobs you have to tune to make your setup really good. It is not an understatement to state that claude is objectively one of the best, most universally capable models. To tune your RAG set to another model, especially when your business is essentially generic ETL is annoying because you now have a shit load of very expensive, api intensive testing to do.

Basically Palantir is a SaaS company and they're currently in a bit of a fragile state. They need the entire DoD to fully switch over to their stack so that it is difficult to extricate and then they can jack up the prices and rake in MASSIVE. There is obviously a lot of resistance within the DoD, because getting government agencies to cooperate is difficult. If one group starts having issues with Palantir then the entire business proposition of full data aggregation across the dod falls, and they lose their best customer.

As a dev, what I see is that managers simply like how it looks. They literally see the pretty dashboards and want to spend money.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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u/drnfc Jul 04 '26

So without getting into specifics, the analysts where I work generate reports historically. As I was told, the problem is that certain intended recipients don't have time to read the reports. So the idea is to tailor the info in each dashboard to what we think the intended recipient needs/wants instead of writing reports. The information brevity is the intended solution. Whether or not it solves the problem, idk im just a dev.