Excellent op-ed by #CSIRO Chair Ming Long AM and Deputy CEO, Professor Elanor Huntington @profElanor on #SovereignAI and the double bind of #data and #AI.
This position - which carries strong weight given the roles Prof Huntington and Ms Long have - as Deputy CEO and Chair respectively of CSIRO - echoes recent calls from like-minded heavyweights such as Dr Alex Antic and Simon Kriss.
What we need now is concerted action, funding, and collaboration across the government, academic and industry sectors to move forward before the level of dependence is intractable.
The current efforts toward Sovereign hashtag#AI in Australia are deeply problematic for a range of reasons.
Business has taken the lead - sensing the market opportunity and profits to be had by developing sovereign models - then selling them back to government and academia.
They're bottle-necked by access to sovereign data for training.
Kangaroo LLM's approach was to to scrape all .au websites - without consent from site owners, using volunteer labour pitched as #OpenSource. Maincode is working on Mathilda - pitched as "Australia's LLM". They're hiring ML and NLP PhDs. They're not transparent about how they're collecting data for Mathilda, but claim to have partnerships with government, and to be working on profit-sharing models for entities that provide data for training. Maincode is bootstrapped by a founder who made their money in online gambling.
Academia sees the problem - but is too cash-strapped and in survivability mode to act unilaterally - and needs to partner with industry and government to have any chance of steering sovereign AI ethically, transparently, sustainably and responsibly.
Government is taking policy advice - or should that be - having policy written for them - by the tech giants who gain the most from Australia NOT having sovereign AI capabilities - such as the Tech Council of Australia which is funded by corporations who now seek to gain a return on the massive up front investment in training foundation models. We've even seen pitches recently to get governments to fund LLM use for every citizen - on the promise of as-yet-not-evidence productivity gains.
Imagine - every Australian citizen providing training data for a foreign-owned corporation - and the government paying for it!
So, what do we need?
Strong regulation. Access to sovereign data that is legal and compensated. Certainty for business on selling access to sovereign models to government. Well-funded AI centres in universities to provide talent pipelines.
And most of all? We need to back ourselves.
(Note: the term "sovereign" is problematic - as Keir Winesmith so well articulated to me - because sovereignty was never ceded - but we don't have a better term, yet) in Australia.
https://www.afr.com/technology/australian-ai-data-competition-risk-20250827-p5mq8s
