In previous blogs I have discussed the fact that the IT sector is prone to over-hyping innovations.
The hype around AI continues apace and its not just ‘hype’ ,the ‘big tech’ companies are investing more that the sovereign wealth of most countries in LLM’s and massive data centres hoping to capture the market and produce the largest monopoly of the means of production since the start of the Industrial Revolution almost 400 years ago.
For example this photo is the construction site for Open AI’s Stargate new huge data centre
For reports on investment by ‘big tech’ in AI infrastructure see Artificial Intelligence Insights | Bain & Company
But all is not going so well for these investors.
Firstly technological development hasn’t gone along with expectations- for example the rather underwhelming GPT5.
Secondly a different scenario for the future based on AI is developing.
The history of computer technology, from the earliest days, is peppered with examples of engineers scientists and developers sharing knowledge (see Wikipedia ‘history of free and open source software’) The open source movement took hold and has been an enduring part of the IT environment ever since. AI development is no exception. Already there are open-source LLM’s that are approaching GPT-4’s performance on certain benchmarks, including language understanding, general knowledge and problem solving.
New models like Deepseek are being developed outside the ‘big tech’ group at far lower costs.
Earlier this month, Switzerland released a large language model (LLM) akin to ChatGPT, which was trained with its own infrastructure, fluent in 1,000 languages and dialects, and estimated to cost about ($A75 million).
It is feasible that countries like Australia could produce their own LLM’s that showcased our history culture and current conditions,as well as hopefully ensuring that content providers are properly remunerated for their work
Already there are Australian companies including Maincode and Sovereign Australia AI who are making exciting progress.
Australia has globally competitive data sets such as in health that with the right governance and privacy provisions could be a huge source of generative AI supported new diagnostics and individualised treatments without being forced to pay monopoly prices by a few foreign tech companies