Alex Karp, the CEO of controversial tech company Palantir, raised eyebrows during a recent live interview with the New York Times. In a viral video of the discussion, Karp defended his company to the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, gesturing dramatically with his arms, bouncing up and down on his chair, and struggling to make his point.
Palantir’s X account shared the video on Sunday morning and announced Karp is launching The Neurodivergent Fellowship: “If you find yourself relating to [Karp] in this video — unable to sit still, or thinking faster than you can speak — we encourage you to apply.”
Palantir announced Karp himself would conduct final interviews for the fellowship. In a reply to the first message on X, the company included an application link to the fellowship, which is available in Palantir’s New York City and Washington, D.C. offices.
“The current LLM tech landscape positions [neurodivergent people] to dominate,” according to the application. “Pattern recognition. Non-linear thinking. Hyperfocus. The cognitive traits that make the neurodivergent different are precisely what make them exceptional in an AI-driven world.”
Palantir, a data and analytics company co-founded by conservative “kingmaker” Peter Thiel, was quick to argue that the fellowship is not a DEI initiative.
“Palantir is launching the Neurodivergent Fellowship as a recruitment pathway for exceptional neurodivergent talent,” according to the application, “This is not a diversity initiative. We believe neurodivergent individuals will have a competitive advantage as elite builders of the next technological era, and we’re hiring accordingly for all roles.”
You forgot to say that the paper in this story can be anything. It can be a short letter you spend hours perfecting just because. Or one paragraph on a subject that somehow seems more magical than the rest of life in this specific moment. It’s not even necessarily something big. You can hyperfocus on drawing and redrawing one icon again and again.
In this case it was just a decent gen ed literature paper but yeah I once literally couldn’t stop reading the Wikipedia article about the evolution of plants when I was unmedicated.
I’m more likely to talk of hyperfocus when it’s things theoretically people would think are good to be unable to stop focusing on like school, work, or learning. This is largely because crashing on the couch doomscrolling instead of eating is something even neurotypicals do these days and because talking about all the nights I spent playing binding of Isaac or civilization with zero capacity to stop and do my damn homework or go to bed make it sound like a failing and like I’m blaming my mental illness.
But yeah, it’s inability to regulate attention and we live in a world in which sophisticated tools for catching and maintaining attention are extremely commonplace and should be more regulated.