{"id":317333,"date":"2025-11-29T22:23:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T22:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/317333\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T22:23:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T22:23:09","slug":"sovereign-australia-ai-aims-to-build-ai-reflecting-australian-values-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/317333\/","title":{"rendered":"Sovereign Australia AI aims to build AI reflecting Australian values"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI, which opened its first Australian office<\/a> in Sydney this year, isn\u2019t ceding ground. Speaking at Canva\u2019s Create event, OpenAI\u2019s managing director for international, Oliver Jay, said Australia was already one of the company\u2019s most important markets.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe user growth in Australia has gone two and a half times since a year ago,\u201d Jay told Canva co-founder Cameron Adams on stage. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot of momentum.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jay said OpenAI was hiring aggressively locally and working with partners including CommBank, Coles and Canva. The company has developed an \u201cOpenAI for countries\u201d program to work directly with governments on national AI strategies.<\/p>\n

In a separate interview, Jay acknowledged the case for local investment: \u201cCountries investing in their own AI capabilities is a good thing \u2013 it builds resilience and sovereignty.\u201d But he argued OpenAI\u2019s frontier models could serve Australian needs through localisation \u201cacross three layers \u2013 in the model itself, in the product, and in the broader ecosystem of Australian partners.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"OpenAI<\/p>\n

OpenAI executive Oliver Jay.<\/p>\n

Kriss isn\u2019t buying it. He points to Donald Trump\u2019s recent directive to American AI founders that their next models \u201ccannot be woke\u201d \u2013 no discussion of diversity, inclusion or climate change.<\/p>\n

\"Atlassian<\/p>\n

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes in the company\u2019s new Melbourne office.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that what we want for Australia? We have our own values here,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the same thing as should we pay for copyrighted content. We believe we should, because that\u2019s Australian.\u201d Sovereign Australia AI has earmarked $10 million to compensate copyright holders and announced research partnerships with UNSW and Deakin University to develop benchmarks for measuring how \u201cAustralian\u201d an AI model actually is.<\/p>\n

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian co-founder and Australia\u2019s most prominent tech billionaire, is sceptical. He argues Australia should focus on applying AI rather than building foundation models.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not building foundation models. There\u2019s some crazy, cool science in building these models \u2013 it\u2019s an awesome intellectual exercise,\u201d Cannon-Brookes told this masthead. \u201cWhat I need to be good at is applying those models to customer problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said Australia\u2019s real opportunity was cheap renewable power for AI data centres and smart adoption across the economy \u2013 not chasing Silicon Valley\u2019s model-building race.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis sense that we need to own all the fundamental technologies \u2013 I get lost by that,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we provided a shedload of power to data centres and we\u2019re applying AI in our economy, we\u2019d be in a way better spot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Technology veteran Craig Dargusch, chief data officer at information services company Cotality, said the challenge was more fundamental than most realised.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we gathered every word ever written by Australians throughout history, it still wouldn\u2019t come close to the data required to train a purely Australian foundational model,\u201d Dargusch said. \u201cLarge language models are built on humanity\u2019s collective knowledge-wisdom accumulated over thousands of years. AI has already broken free of nations and borders.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he argued the solution wasn\u2019t necessarily building from scratch \u2013 it was fine-tuning existing models for local context.<\/p>\n

Still, Dargusch said Australia should aspire to build its own model. \u201cThere\u2019s an opportunity to create something uniquely Australian \u2013 unlocking ancient Aboriginal stories passed down through oral tradition, concepts like mateship and the \u2018fair go\u2019 woven into the digital fabric,\u201d he said. \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be great to lead that charge?\u201d<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

Sovereign Australia AI isn\u2019t alone. Melbourne-based Maincode debuted its model Matilda at SXSW Sydney last month, although chief executive Dave Lemphers has distanced himself from sovereignty rhetoric, calling it \u201cvery divisive\u201d.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s research suggests AI could add $142 billion annually to Australia\u2019s economy by 2030. But Kriss warns that benefit could flow offshore if the underlying infrastructure isn\u2019t Australian-owned.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the foundational AI models Australians rely on are built offshore, we risk losing control over how our national values are represented.\u201d<\/p>\n

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI, which opened its first Australian office in Sydney this year, isn\u2019t ceding ground. Speaking at Canva\u2019s Create…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":317253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-317333","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}