The government will give Australia’s competition watchdog more power to keep the likes of Google and Meta accountable as part of the News Media Bargaining Code which redistributes wealth from big tech companies into local news outlets in an effort to address an apparent power imbalance in the media industry. On Monday, the Commonwealth said… Read more »
The government has committed to a mere 7-day processing time for applicants of its newest skilled visa category in a bid to make Australia a more attractive for IT professionals as part of a set of long-awaited changes to the migration system. Migrants coming into jobs that earn at least $135,000 a year will have… Read more »
Toby Walsh is one of Australia’s most well-known experts on artificial intelligence and his latest book Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World aims to dispel the common illusion that machine intelligence is comparable to human intelligence. It’s an illusion deeply embedded in the history of AI that could have disastrous consequences, Walsh believes, unless… Read more »
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) would be given expanded regulatory powers over bring digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) companies, and crypto assets under proposed reforms to national payments systems legislation published this week. In a statement, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the reforms “[address] the risks posed by new digital payments services, which are currently unregulated, to… Read more »
Australian authors have been caught up in a major controversy around the data used to train large language models after an investigation uncovered 183,000 pirated books were included in a commonly used dataset called Books3. Booker Prize winning novelist Richard Flanagan was among the Australian writers whose works were in the dataset that was reportedly… Read more »
Microsoft has been its own worst enemy this week as the tech giant suffered two unrelated data leak incidents where masses of internal documents, trade secrets, and backups of employee computers were released on the internet. On Tuesday, researchers at security company Wiz went public about a 38TB trove of data that Microsoft’s AI team had accidentally… Read more »
The Australian government will continue to authorise a one-to-many facial recognition system connected to the national ID database but is limiting its use to helping identify “shielded persons” like undercover police and protected witnesses. Once referred to as ‘the Capability’, the Department of Home Affairs built a system for the public and private sector to verify people’s… Read more »
ChatGPT’s ability to write code has been getting worse over the last few months with the percentage of prompts that produce working code results dropping severely between March and June, a new study has found. A team of researchers from Stanford and the University of California Berkely set out to test how the large language… Read more »
Today Meta launched its long-awaited new social media product Threads, a Twitter clone that syncs to Instagram accounts and offers a chaotic feed filled with influencers, news outlets, and brands vying for attention. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Threads was intended as “an open and friendly public space for conversation.” “We hope to take what… Read more »
State and territory governments have agreed, with the Commonwealth, to increase their use of biometrics for identification in a bid to make the federated ID scheme more resilient to fraud and identity theft. Identification services are spread across the states and territories, that are in charge of driver licences and birth certificates, and the Commonwealth… Read more »
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman downplayed the potential for the technology to take over jobs at an event in Melbourne last week, saying instead the technology will instead put “higher expectations” on human beings. Altman has an unsurprisingly optimistic view about human nature will respond to the rise of AI, saying he doesn’t think people will… Read more »
The government is moving to regulate buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services under the Credit Act and force companies like AfterPay, to follow a set of responsible lending obligations. Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones on Monday that he wanted to maintain innovation and competition in the market but stop the “harmful effects of poor marketing practices and poor… Read more »
Australia’s long-awaited first National Quantum Strategy launched on Wednesday as the government looks to cement the country’s position as a world leader in quantum technologies which are forecast to create 19,400 jobs by 2045. The strategy focuses on five critical themes relating to the development, investment, and use of quantum technologies; securing the industry’s supply… Read more »
Turing Award winner and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has resigned from his position with Google in order to speak more openly about the dangers of artificial intelligence, raising questions about whether tech giants have silenced the people most qualified to inform the public about the emerging technology’s effects. In 2012, Hinton and two of his students, Ilya Sutskever… Read more »
When Elon Musk closed the deal to buy Twitter late last year, the company suddenly found itself facing a US$3 billion yearly deficit and was four months away from bankruptcy, the billionaire told the BBC in an interview last week. Why was Twitter in trouble? Because Musk bought it. “In rough numbers, in a normal… Read more »
Brisbane recycling social enterprise Circonomy placed in voluntary liquidation 
Words of wisdom: Live caption translator Sunflower AI wins Best New Idea in Best in Tech Awards 
Bailador tops up volunteer management startup Rosterfy with $3 million 
Australian quantum software startup Q-CTRL tops up Series B with $88 million 
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