Day three, the research symposium day, was the reason I came. You do not often get to hear and interact with Sir Demis Hassabis, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun and alike on the same day. Sir Demis predicted AGI within five to eight years. Whether that timeline holds or not, two themes stood out. First, learning…
Day two was a collision of optimism, scale, and strategic uncertainty. I spent most of it roaming the exhibition hall and joining panels. Reportedly, the summit is attracting close to 300,000 people. Large global firms, small startups, sovereign AI showcases. It genuinely feels as if the entire AI industry has descended on India. What did…
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…
Very excited about the work we contributed to the redesign of NSW’s AI Assessment Framework, released last week. It includes several world-leading design elements that reflect a more mature way of thinking about AI risk. Most AI risk frameworks don’t fail because they miss risks. They fail because they never narrow them in a principled…
As Australia’s representative on the international expert advisory panel, I’m glad to see the 2026 AI Safety Science Report released under the leadership of Yoshua Bengio. The findings will be discussed further at the India AI Impact Summit later this month. I will be there. Beyond what is written in the report, CSIRO’s Data61 continues…
In case you missed our year-end summary of the progress we’ve made in responsible AI at CSIRO’s Data61 in 2025, you can find it here. From launching the new Engineering AI Systems book, our practical guide to AI design and the operation of high-quality AI systems, to partnering with the Audit Office of NSW to…
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…
This is a slightly delayed post because I was on annual leave when the National AI Centre released 𝗕𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗔𝗜 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 – 𝗔 𝗴𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀. https://lnkd.in/gpBUmeCX Coming back, I saw the level of uptake, discussion, and genuine relief from the community, and I want to say how pleased I am with…
How can generative and agentic AI improve public auditing without weakening trust? CSIRO’s Data61 has recently entered a multi year partnership with the Audit Office of New South Wales to explore how AI can support government audit functions in a transparent, accountable, and responsible way. I wanted to rephrase and share this after seeing the…
Research Director, CSIRO
Conjoint Professor, CSE UNSW
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