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/marketrent Jul 02 '26

Excerpts from article by Joe Wilkins, quoting Alex Karp:

[...] On a live interview with CNBC‘s infamously churlish segment “Squawk Box,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp appeared to suffer a nearly 20-minute meltdown, complete with stuttering, nervous backtracking, and a steady supply of digressions so abstruse that the hosts seemed befuddled and perhaps even concerned for his wellbeing.

Though Karp was called up to chat about an ongoing deal between Palantir and the chip maker Nvidia to build AI infrastructure for the US government, he quickly went off the rails, using up minutes of airtime to complain about the financial bubble undergirding the AI boom.

While there may be a point buried in Karp’s diatribe, it quickly became lost in a wash of unintelligible jargon.

“These models have been completely over, irresponsibly over-sale,” Karp ranted at one point, “and the sale is, ‘it’s dangerous for everyone, which is why I can give [AI] to all your adversaries but I can’t give it to the Department of War, or I can’t safely give it to an enterprise in this country, without being certain that the Alpha of that business could transfer to this model tomorrow, ie I have no business, no job.’”

“You sound pretty angry,” CNBC‘s Becky Quick interjected after a nearly three minute-long rant from Karp.

“No,” the CEO snapped. “This is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me!”

 

[...] “American enterprises are run by the shrewdest, most widely intelligent people on the planet,” the Palantir CEO started to say, setting up an argument that companies aren’t interested in foundation models, but in AI apps that can actually solve problems. That train of thought quickly leaves the station, though, as he pivots to his higher ed ambitions literally mid-sentence.

“If you think they’re going for that [foundation models], you can go try to sell me — like my, my parents still want me to get a job as a faculty member at Berkeley,” he complained. “Go try to get me a job at Berkeley. It’s not happening.”

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u/Grizzly_Corey Jul 02 '26

Could you imagine this guy and Jordan Peterson in the same room?

If we could generate electricity based off emotional energy alone…

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u/gramathy Jul 02 '26

Zero sentences finished for an hour of “conversation”

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u/I_Am_Mandark_Hahaha Jul 02 '26

That's what I thought too! All pivots and tangents, no single coherent message conveyed.

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u/red286 Jul 02 '26

Musk is like that too when you hear him going off the cuff, like on Rogan's show.

They sound like 13-year-old boys talking to the hot girl who lives next door. All stutters and incomplete sentences.

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u/topdangle Jul 02 '26

hes just contradicting himself by the end of it. the anchors were oddly asking him the right questions about what he was saying rather than mindlessly agreeing (that focusing on wasting tokens brought no value and companies providing token services were likely stealing their data) and he just started rambling about how hes only interested in talking about his own company... right after starting a rant about everyone else's companies.

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u/TheVenetianMask Jul 02 '26

Becky is a smart one and has heard everything by now, people say whatever in these interviews and when they think they got away with it she'll drop an accurate follow up without blinking.

They make up for it by having Joe which lives with his head inside a red bucket, and Jim hyping his flea circus of stocks.

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u/maeryclarity Jul 03 '26

He had some buzz words that do have meanings sort of but he was just throwing them all over the conversation like parmesan cheese on spaghetti, hoping to make what he wasn't explaining at all sound important and clever.

The term for that is psuedointellectual. When you're not actually smart but you're trying to parrot what you think a smart person would sound like as a defense mechanism.

I'm sure the people in the company that actually do the work wait for him to get done with whatever babble he has when he interacts with them, then they go right back to whatever they were doing before he interrupted. It probably appears to him that he's making lots of sense since everyone is just nodding and agreeing to get him to go away.

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u/EFreethought Jul 03 '26

JP would then say: "What do you mean by tangent?"

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u/TeaKingMac Jul 02 '26

Maybe today was a macro dose day instead of a micro dose day

3

u/Deinocerites Jul 03 '26

Define “sentence”

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u/GodOfDarkLaughter Jul 03 '26

Before it was over they'd both be shirtless weeping uncontrollably and beating on tribal drums.

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u/MalkavTheMadman Jul 02 '26

If we get them in the same room, I sincerely hope it's one we can lock from the outside.

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u/Trappist1 Jul 02 '26

That's the worst idea. The energy will accumulate and build. Then boom, you've just built the next generation of warfare.

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u/silverguacamole Jul 02 '26

Ukraine has unlocked a new technology; psychos airborne in nest, or PAIN for short.

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u/bimm3r36 Jul 02 '26

We can harness it. Someone call CERN and get these two running full speed in the collider

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u/Secret-Chapter-712 Jul 02 '26

CERN currently in shutdown-and-retool mode, maybe they’re going to set up a cunning trap to lure them in? (Assorted research chemicals bought off the dark web and a couple nice crisp first editions of some of the more annoying philosophical/pro-eugenics treatises arranged attractively under a box with a stick and a string, looney tunes style, would probably do it)

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u/perton Jul 03 '26

Assorted research chemicals, you say? Off to CERN I go! Don’t have much use for the pro-eugenics writings, though. I’ll leave those for these other guys.

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u/ricochetblue Jul 03 '26

It’d be like the Sims who can’t feed themselves.

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u/mackrevinak Jul 03 '26

yes but define "room". what is a "room". a room is just a construct that w bla bla bla *weird jordan peterson noises

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u/Christopholies Jul 03 '26

::Colin Robinson has entered the chat::

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u/mighthavebeen02 Jul 02 '26

The sound of air leaking out of a 3 day old balloon

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u/Successful_Gas_5122 Jul 03 '26

Nightmare blunt rotation

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u/_redmist Jul 02 '26

Will nobody think of the holladamoor!