In his National Press Club address last week, Atlassian co-founder and Tech Council of Australia Chair Scott Farquhar outlined an ambitious future for artificial intelligence in Australia grounded in sovereign capability and economic opportunity.

He mapped out the AI ecosystem in layers: infrastructure, chips, models, and applications. He made a compelling case for Australia’s competitive strengths in green-powered data centres and rightly noted that chip manufacturing may be out of reach.

But when it came to the critical layer of foundational models (the engines that drive today’s most powerful AI systems) his argument gave pause.

Farquhar suggested we don’t need to build our own. We can, he said, simply make use of the models developed in the US, Europe or China – all open and available.

Yes, we can. Until we can’t.

Read the full article here: https://www.innovationaus.com/scott-farquhar-is-wrong-sovereignty-demands-a-home-grown-ai-model/