Short Fuse

Zeitgeist

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 [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Musk Sues Open AI, Mythos Locked, Meta Layoffs, Tokenomics, More Robots

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 keystroke logging and latest round of layoffs, the missing AI productivity gains, and humanoid robots at CES vs Hannover Messe. 00:00 Welcome Back and Podcast Overview 00:47 Elon Musk vs OpenAI: The Lawsuit 03:39 The Future of AI and OpenAI's Challenges 07:05 Consumer Preferences in AI: Anthropic vs OpenAI 08:35 Meta's AI Strategy and Workforce Concerns 10:30 Mythos and Cybersecurity: The Cost of AI Models 14:53 The Economics of AI: Subsidies and Costs 20:04 Humanoid Robots: CES vs Hannover Messe Short Fuse is a podcast about emerging tech, human behaviour, and cultural movements. Hosts take long and short positions on the stories that matter and defend their reasoning. Visit shortfuseresearch.com for written analysis, the discovery tracker, and bespoke research. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Memory

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 four-and-a-half-year search for a new car. Long or short on memory? They're both short. The argument is worth hearing anyway. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Short Fuse News: Meta Confused, Vibe Coding, Bernie vs Claude, NVIDIA DLSS5

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 big tech giants signed a voluntary energy pledge at the White House, which is going about as well as the stakeholder capitalism open letter from 2019. Also: the Carey System gets its first official outing, Ollie is still not buying a car, and Duncan nearly gets something right about Jensen Huang. ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Education

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 actually for, who benefits when human teachers get replaced, and does any of this solve the fact that seven years of French lessons produced zero French speakers? ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.