Good panel discussion the Deloitte Connect event yesterday: “Why Australia? Conditions that cement us as a regional leader and exporter of AI.” Thanks to Joana Valente for moderating, and to fellow panellists Paul Grimes Belinda Dennett , and Rianne Van Veldhuizen for a thoughtful conversation. My contribution focused on a few questions/dimensions that may help…
Back from New Delhi, and after letting the conversations and ideas settle for a few days, here are my final reflections from the AI Impact Summit. As a scientist, the most valuable moments were not the plenaries, but the deep, sometimes once-in-a-lifetime discussions with individual AI pioneers building AI in frontier labs, startups and research…
Day one has been “slightly” chaotic, in the best possible way. I’ve never seen this many people at a conference. Industry, startups, government, students, press. Rooms were packed, with people standing along the walls and spilling into corridors. The surprise visit by Prime Minister Modi to the exhibition hall added another layer of disruption and…
Reading “Being Indian” by Pavan K. Varma on the flight into New Delhi was an unexpectedly good prelude to the Indian AI Impact Summit. The book wrestles with identity, continuity, and contradiction in a civilisation that absorbs shocks without losing coherence. It made me reflect on how we are currently talking about AI. I’ve just…
Happy new year! The shutdown period is often when the noise drops and the big questions surface. This year, that quiet coincided with genuinely striking progress in AI coding agents, especially in the six to eight weeks following the release of Claude Opus 4.5, and its integration into Claude Code. We have seen world-class software…
As part of the international expert advisory group representing Australia, I’m pleased to see the second Key Update of the AI Safety Science Report, led by Yoshua Bengio, released (link in the comment). The official update captures the broad progress: more robust adversarial training, better AI-generated content tracking, wider adoption of frontier safety frameworks, and…
I often share missed or surprising observations in my talks. Here are five of them, summarised as food for thought. 𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵 𝟭: 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗮𝘀-𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗔𝗜 𝘄𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀.It’s intuitive to think globally trained models can’t reflect our norms. Yet when frontier models answer the same cultural questions posed to national cohorts, they align most…
Every confidential message you’ve sent may already be stored — waiting to be unlocked. This is the essence of the “𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁-𝗻𝗼𝘄, 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗿𝘆𝗽𝘁-𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿” problem: data intercepted today could be decrypted once quantum computers mature. This week CSIRO’s Data61 released our new report, 𝙌𝙪𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙪𝙢 𝙎𝙖𝙛𝙚 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣: 𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙃𝙪𝙧𝙙𝙡𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙋𝙖𝙩𝙝𝙬𝙖𝙮𝙨, mapping the scale of the challenge and…
What counts as a 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻, really? From the strict sense in 𝗮𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘄—where a decision formally alters someone’s rights or entitlements—to the everyday sense where almost everything, from selecting a movie to choosing a candidate, feels like a decision. Yet across these very different contexts, the underlying anatomy looks surprisingly similar. In CSIRO’s Data61 new…
New paper alert (working draft)! “When you really understand what AI is doing, it’s no longer AI — it’s just boring automation.” That old AI community joke captures the paradox of human oversight. We trust calculators and complex business process engines with millions of if–else rules, running hundreds of steps, responding to environmental changes, and…
Director/Head of CSIRO’s Data61
Conjoint Professor, CSE UNSW
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