Short Fuse

Meta wants smart glasses to become normal. We’re less convinced. Duncan and Ollie look at the appeal, the genuinely useful bits, and what happens when nobody can tell whether the person looking at them is also filming them? Accessibility, AI assistants, privacy, public embarrassment, hacked recording lights and why Ollie may soon have to conduct all organised crime completely naked. Hosted on Acas...

AI might kill us all. That is increasingly the warning coming from the people building the most powerful models. The awkward bit is that they are much less specific about how. This week, we get into the latest wave of AI doom, why Anthropic and OpenAI keep talking about existential risk, whether self improving AI changes the equation, and why regulation may be doing more than keeping us safe. We a...

Has AGI finally arrived, or have we just moved the goalposts again? Duncan and Ollie pick apart what artificial general intelligence is supposed to mean, why the definition keeps changing, and whether today’s smartest models are still more book smart than street smart. Then, inevitably, things drift towards superintelligence, nuclear war and the Cobra effect. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

Nvidia reportedly wants to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. On paper, it is another enormous AI deal. In practice, it could give the world’s dominant AI chipmaker control of the platform at the centre of open source AI. We get into why Nvidia might want Hugging Face, why the deal could be a very clever hedge against OpenAI and Anthropic building their own chips, the possibility of a GeForce Now...

Anthropic is putting invisible watermarks into text generated by Claude. Which sounds like bad news for AI slop. Until you start asking what counts as AI generated in the first place. What happens if Claude edits one sentence? If AI reorganises your own ideas? If your company actively expects you to use AI at work? And if AI touches almost everything we write, does an AI watermark eventually tell...

Who are the good guys in AI? Bad news: there probably aren’t any. We look at Anthropic, OpenAI, open weights, corporate backstabbing and the curious business strategy of telling everyone your product might destroy civilisation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steve Jobs said great artists steal. Apple's lawyers would now like a word. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SoftBank has explained the future of AI using a golden goose, a conveyor belt of ASI eggs and the calm financial logic of a man trying to turn PowerPoint into scripture. Duncan and Ollie ask whether the AI boom has become a bubble, a religion, or just a very expensive bird with ARM inside it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Prediction markets, smart glasses, a Kylie Jenner voice in your sunglasses. Meta will copy anything that moves. Today: the most profitable company on earth with no idea what it actually wants to be. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

OpenAI is burning through money fast enough to make a small country nervous, so we worked out how long the runway really is and what happens when one of these AI giants can't pay its bills. It's also really, really hot. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Short Fuse News, Duncan and Ollie tackle SpaceX buying Cursor, the UK’s looming social media ban, and Google deciding it might quite like to sell chips after all. Expect AI wrappers, Jensen jail, tech bros building tents full of servers, and the usual disciplined attempt to stay on topic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The US government has told Anthropic that Fable is off-limits to anyone who isn't American. Is it genuinely too dangerous, or the best marketing stunt since a deodorant advert convinced a generation of boys they'd be chased down the street? Duncan and Ollie work through it via Occam's razor, Aesop, and what the name "Fable" might have been trying to tell us all along. Then SpaceX floats, goes up t...

Sam Altman woke up, put on his red velour dressing gown, and decided your job is safe after all. Duncan and Ollie get into the great AI climbdown, the Pope's beef with the machines, and the growing public urge to take a hammer to a data centre. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Duncan and Ollie explore the concept of the zeitgeist, analyzing various perspectives from AI models and their own insights. They discuss societal trust, technological change, cultural shifts, and potential future scenarios, offering a deep and humorous look at the mood of our times. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Musk is suing OpenAI, Anthropic is keeping Mythos locked behind Project Glasswing, and the age of subsidised AI is ending. We're back after a break to work through the news that piled up. Duncan and Ollie cover the OpenAI lawsuit and what discovery might surface, why Mythos staying behind closed doors is as much an economics story as a safety one, the Opus 4.7 pricing sleight of hand, Meta's keyst...

You probably won't remember this episode. That's partly the joke, and partly the point. Duncan and Ollie get into what AI is doing to human memory: why it's already unreliable, why offloading recall to a machine might be making it worse, and why you'll eventually stop noticing the difference between a decision you made and one a chatbot/agent made for you. Also: a 17p refund dispute, and Ollie's f...

Meta's VR retreat turns out to be more complicated than the LinkedIn takes suggested. Karpathy vibe-coded a jobs analysis, got ratio'd, and deleted it. Bernie Sanders got Claude to endorse a data centre moratorium, which tells you more about how these models work than it does about data centres. Nvidia's DLSS5 is yassifying your favourite game characters whether you asked for it or not. And the bi...

Are teachers obsolete? Duncan and Ollie place their bets on the future of education in an age of AI tutors, personalised learning, and students who are angrier about AI than you'd expect. From Alpha Schools and their two-hour AI-led curriculum to Duncan's catastrophic one-out-of-ten test score that got a standing ovation from a chatbot, this one gets into the real questions: what is education actu...

What happens to capitalism when AI can outproduce 10,000 workers on a single GPU? When white collar jobs vanish, software builds itself, and the middlemen connecting buyers to sellers get replaced? Duncan and Ollie go long and short on the future of the entire economic system, using a viral (and wildly controversial) research report as their launchpad. They cover the barriers standing between toda...

Ollie and Duncan are back with a quick news roundup, from layoffs and market-moving essays to the growing debate around AI safety and government contracts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are human leaders becoming obsolete in the age of AI? Join Duncan and Ollie as they dig into the future of leadership. Discover if AI can truly replace the intuition, inspiration, and moral judgment of human leaders. This episode explores the subtle ways AI is reshaping leadership roles and questions whether our uniquely human traits can keep leadership alive. Perfect for anyone curious about the...

On this week's Short Fuse podcast, Duncan and Ollie dive into the latest tech intelligence dashboard to dissect the biggest stories shaking up the industry. From the persistent debates on government surveillance and job displacement to the "catfight" between AI giants, we break down what's hype and what's actually happening. We explore the rise of local AI agents like "MoltBot" and the security ni...

OpenAI is finally bringing ads to ChatGPT. In this episode, Duncan and Ollie decide if they are Long or Short on this strategy. The cost of computing power is massive. We discuss whether advertising is the necessary answer for OpenAI or if it fundamentally breaks the utility of the product. The discussion covers the incentives behind the move, the likely impact on user behaviour, and what this sig...

Join Duncan and Ollie in this episode of "Short Fuse" as they dive into the latest and quirkiest gadgets from CES 2026. From humanoid robots with Brad Pitt's hair to AI companions that wink, the duo explores the fascinating and sometimes bizarre world of consumer electronics. Tune in for a blend of humor and insight as they debate the practicality and future of these innovations. Don't miss their...

The Metaverse was promised as the next great leap for the internet—a decentralised, immersive world where we would work, shop, and socialise. But as we approach the dates set by major analysts for mass adoption, the reality looks very different. In this episode of Short Fuse, Ollie and Duncan take a critical look at the state of Extended Reality (XR) and the Metaverse. We explore the massive disco...