Australia should be ambitious about creating local AI models and building the tools and applications that will run on them, assistant minister for Science, Technology and the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton says.
While there is a public focus right now on attracting a share of the billions being invested globally in AI infrastructure, the government supports full participation by Australian companies in AI, including in local large language models.
In the episode of the Commercial Disco, Dr Charlton rejects warnings from UNSW economist Richard Holden that Australia must resist the temptation to build sovereign AI.
He said Australia’s ambitions, supported by government policy, must include building Australian AI models and applications. This does not necessarily mean trying to build a competitor to ChatGPT.
“There is a wide range of different capabilities here,” Dr Charlton said. “There are foundational LLM models, there are niche or sector-specific models [and] there is a layer of applications above those models.
“Australia may well not deliver something that competes directly with ChatGPT. But I think we definitely should have ambitions as a nation to be participating in the creation of AI tools – including building models for specific applications and purposes, and software and other application layers on top of models.
“That has to be a clear objective of the Australian tech sector, backed by the Australian government – to make sure that Australia is participating in the industry, growing great companies in a sector that’s going to be a core part of Australia’s future AI ambitions.”
To be clear, Dr Charlton says there are already examples of great Australia companies that have already performed in this area – Harrison.ai being a hugely successful example in the global healthcare sector.
Andrew Charlton has played a central role in helping shape the Albanese government’s policy programs related to artificial intelligence, data centres and other digital infrastructure.
This has included the government’s ongoing efforts to attract a sizeable slice of data centre market, which if everything goes to plan could attract many tens of billions of foreign investments in the coming decade.
Having recently travelled to the US for discussions with companies like OpenAI, Grok, Anthropic, Google and others, Dr Charlton said there is strong interest in building AI infrastructure in Australia.
The scale of that foreign investment is already measured in the tens of billions of dollars between now and the end of the decade and is likely to grow by many tens of billions more.
“We put forward that Australia has lots of natural advantages in AI and data centres,” Dr Charlton said.
“We have got a skilled workforce. We’ve got good proximity to some important regional centres and we’ve got access to renewables.,” he said.
“We are a Five Eyes country. We’re a trusted nation. And all of that makes us a pretty interesting.”
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