For Dave Lemphers, there’s no middle ground in the developments he sees opening a new industrial revolution.
You’re either on the AI ship, or waving its opportunities goodbye — and right now, Australia is yet to board.
Online entrepreneur and Australian billionaire Ed Craven is backing a Melbourne-based effort to rival Open AI, Google, Meta and the like in artificial intelligence.
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Lemphers is leading the company — ‘Maincode’ — and says Australia’s first sovereign large language model — to be called ‘Matilda’ — could be released by the end of the year.
“She’s young and she’s small, but she’s scrappy,” he says, playing to the idea Matilda is heading into a David and Goliath fight with Big Tech, but is doing so, happily.
But for the cloud computing and machine learning specialist who left Australia 16 years ago to join Microsoft in Seattle, it’s a fight were the stakes are huge.
In an interview with 7NEWS’ ‘The Issue’, Lemphers calls artificial intelligence “a brand new industrial revolution” with some potential outcomes that are “really scary”.
“Our values and our culture (are) not being represented in AI today. And if that continues in the future, all of our decisions that are being made through foreign AI will also influence the way we think and act,” he said.
That, he says, “is a terrifying situation”.
He already sees Australian decisions that alarm him, like CommBank’s recent announcement of a multi-year partnership with US based OpenAI.
The bank claims its engineers will be working with Open AI “to strengthen scam and fraud detection and deliver more personalised services for CommBank customers”.
Lemphers sees it as the bank “paying billions of dollars to OpenAI” to upload “critical banking data of Australian customers to a US-owned company that at any point could be compelled to provide that information to the US government”.
“If that doesn’t terrify people, I don’t know what should,” he said.
Though Lemphers also sees unrivalled opportunities for those who catch the AI boat.
A recent Productivity Commission report suggests artificial intelligence will add at least $116 billion to Australia’s GDP over the next decade.
“I think that number is actually very low,” he said.
“It’s understated and it lacks vision for what this capability can actually unlock in Australia.”
But he envisages a world with AI “haves” and “have nots”.
“It’s only going to be for the people who own the AI,” he said.
“So if we are concerned that the future is scary around AI, it’s because if someone else owns that and we’re leasing it back, that’s where it’s a terrifying future.
“We’re already seeing it happening. So whatever AI ushers in, if we aren’t having our own stake in that, then we are really at risk.”
The argument fits neatly with Maincode’s need to drive some local urgency and perhaps government funds into a sector so far dominated by a small number of giant global players.
And yet Lemphers is nothing if not passionate about the business he’s in and the capacity of Australia to carve out a valuable role in it.
Matilda’s David and Goliath battle will be worth watching.
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