Short Fuse

Short Fuse

By Short FuseBusinessTechnology
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Short Fuse episodes

  • AI Breaks Big Tech's Grip
    Your TV is spying on you, your graphics card is holding back performance, and your car wants a monthly subscription to warm your backside. But AI might be about to ruin the fun for manufacturers. This week on Short Fuse, Duncan and Ollie look at the growing trend of people using AI to strip adverts from smart TVs, unlock restricted hardware and get games running on platforms they were never meant to run on. Could AI finally give consumers the upper hand over companies determined to squeeze more money out of products they've already sold us? Or is this just another hobby for people who spend far too much time on Reddit? Somehow, we get from cleaning your television to the collapse of the AI business model and nuclear annihilation. Standard episode, really.

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    26 min
  • AI Might End Humanity, But Look How Cute It Is

    AI might take your job, harvest your data and possibly end civilisation as we know it. But have you seen how CUTE it is?

    Big Tech has apparently decided that the best way to sell us artificial intelligence is to give it googly eyes, a fluffy body and a little French beret.

    This week on Short Fuse, we look at the sudden invasion of adorable AI mascots from Meta, OpenAI and friends. Are they making AI more approachable, or are we being emotionally manipulated by glorified Tamagotchis with access to our bank accounts?

    We discuss cuddly existential threats, the return of Clippy and why Ollie thinks one of OpenAI's mascots looks like a molar.

    The end of humanity has never looked so huggable.

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    13 min
  • Are your AI Glasses Recording Me?
    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 Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    23 min
  • AI is going to kill us all. Details TBC

    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 also ask a fairly basic question: if the danger is as serious as they say, why are they still racing to build it?


    Plus bioweapons, regulatory capture, recursive self improvement, dictatorships, Snowpiercer and the possibility that AI eventually lies to itself.


    Cheerful stuff.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    25 min
  • AGI is here! (apparently)
    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.

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    20 min
  • What Happens If Nvidia Buys Hugging Face?

    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 for AI, and the bigger question hanging over the whole thing: what happens to open source when one of the richest companies on Earth owns the place where much of it lives?

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    15 min
  • The Sloppening

    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 us anything useful at all?

    Duncan and Ollie get into Claude’s new AI watermarking plans, the EU AI Act, AI slop, authorship, false attribution, workplace AI and the increasingly difficult question of who wrote what.

    Also: graffiti, The Hungry Caterpillar, authentically human crime and the beginning of The Sloppening.

    #AI #Claude #Anthropic

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    24 min
  • The Good, The Bad, and The Baddies of AI
    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.

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    18 min
  • Rotten to the Core
    Steve Jobs said great artists steal. Apple's lawyers would now like a word.

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    15 min
  • Golden Eggs and AI God Complexes
    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.

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    14 min

About Short Fuse

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