Short Fuse

By Short Fuse

Technology and socio-economic big bets

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How many episodes does Short Fuse have?

The podcast currently has 46 episodes available.

Short Fuse episodes:

September 24, 2026 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.
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23min
September 15, 2026 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.
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25min
September 11, 2026 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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20min
August 27, 2026 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?
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15min
August 14, 2026 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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24min
July 31, 2026 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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18min
July 15, 2026 Rotten to the Core
Steve Jobs said great artists steal. Apple's lawyers would now like a word.
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15min
June 29, 2026 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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14min
June 25, 2026 What's going on with Meta
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.
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13min
June 24, 2026 The Open AI Money Pit
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.
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14min

FAQs about Short Fuse:

How many episodes does Short Fuse have?

The podcast currently has 46 episodes available.