Just like the rest of the world, Australia has arrived at its AI moment. Decisions that get made today about industry development strategies and productivity will have a big impact in the decades to come.
But, where many of our economic peers around the world have made bold investment decisions about building sovereign AI infrastructure and advanced industry policy to build local AI companies, Australia is still in a policy development phase.
Galileo Ventures’ founder and partner James Alexander says Australia’s AI builder community needs a louder voice in discussions about productivity and technology. And he has come up with a $5 billion strategy outline to rally this nascent startup and deep tech community.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco, Mr Alexander provides an expanded view of his Australia’s AI Moment: The $5 Billion Tall Poppy AI Strategy paper published just prior to the May federal election.
The paper was meant to be a clarion call, made against the backdrop of an election campaign bereft of debate on issues related to AI.
For people in the startup and broader tech sectors, the campaign was strange. Discussions and debates about everything related to AI – from building Australian LLMs and AI data centres to creating AI applications – are unavoidable. It is central to everything.
But to hear national debate by our political leaders about the future of the country without reference to technology, innovation and AI was jarring. How do you even have that conversation?
The voices most prevalent in any discussion about technology are from either from the research and higher education communities, or from the large established enterprises that spend a lot of money on technology, generally sourced from overseas, Mr Alexander said.
Or you hear from – AWS, Google Microsoft – companies with a hefty lobbying budget.
“But when it came to people actually building technology and sovereign capability – the Australian companies – I was very intrigued how there was almost no representation in … some of the policy papers that I had been seeing,” Mr Alexander said.
“And so, part of that policy proposal [that I published] was around providing that voice.”
Mr Alexander says he is conscious that government can’t do everything, and that building a successful local AI industry will need the support of everyone – business, VCs, as well as higher education and research.
But he also knows that it needs national policy to coordinate efforts, to make it happen. Mr Alexander proposes a $5 billion, five-pillar policy plan.
“So [the proposal] is $5 billion split equally across five pillars. And I think the five pillars make a lot of sense. You could debate how much money goes into each, but in this case, it was just: keep things simple.
“The first pillar is core AI research, including a sovereign, large language model capability. I find it confounding that there is no LLM created in Australia, even a small one. I know there are efforts to start, but we really should have a sovereign LLM.”
He says the second billion dollar pillar would be directed at developing sovereign AI capability across industry sectors , from healthcare to manufacturing. Essentially, that would be $1 billion toward support for applied AI across the economy.
The third pillar would be a start toward establishing and nurturing a sovereign semiconductor sector. This would be a tremendous challenge. But Australia does have some advantages that make it potentially well-placed to create something.
“The fourth [pillar of funding] is for incentives for AI model-building companies to establish offices in Australia. London has an Open AI office. Why doesn’t Sydney or Melbourne?
Mr Alexander says we need to ask ourselves what would it take to have the large AI players establish a presence in this country, just as Google built a large and successful engineering operation here early in its evolution.
The fifth billion-dollar pillar relates to the attraction and retention of AI talent. Australia already has a high number of PhDs and high degrees researching and studying AI-related subjects and projects across a variety of disciplines.
A significant portion of this talent pool departs Australia at the conclusion of their studies to head to Silicon Valley. And we need to find a way to keep them,” says.
“And then there’s a retraining component too, [to that $1 billion talent pillar].”
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.