Joseph Brookes

An OpenAI-funded report claims Australia can add $142 billion to the economy by 2030 – a four per cent GDP lift -- if the technology is adopted widely and fuels new domestic capabilities and export industries. The potential AI export industry would require a leap in infrastructure investment from current levels but is estimated in the report to be worth $3 billion alone in annual exports of compute to the Asia Pacific and in training global frontier models. Another $6.3 billion of exports could come from selling software and $1.3 billion more from educating international students in AI.

Investment NSW executive director of innovation Liza Noonan will take the reins of Cicada Innovations next month to lead the 25-year-old deep tech incubator's new era.

US tech giant OpenAI has secured its second federal contract while ratcheting up a policy and sales blitz in Canberra that includes private meeting with Anthony Albanese’s front bench and Australia’s mandarins. The US$500 billion artificial intelligence firm followed its inaugural federal contract with Treasury in July with another small deal, this time with the Commonwealth Grants Commission. Like the first, the new deal was struck without competition and covers licences for OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT.

University of Sydney spinout Gelion Technologies on Tuesday announced a partnership with global electronics behemoth TDK to move its lithium sulfur battery technology into a prototype production phase from Japanese factories.

Australia must tweak business incentives and fund more pilot lines to pull university research across the valley of death with industry, according to materials scientist and recycling pioneer Veena Sahajwalla. In a speech to the National Press Club this week amid a generational review of national R&D, the 2022 NSW Australian of the Year laid out her recycling ‘microfactory’ model as one path forward. The nimble and collaborative approach has seen councils and businesses deploy lab developed technologies in use cases like recycling mattresses and glass into ceramic tiles, turning ewaste into 3D printing filament, or recovering aluminium destined for landfill.

Australian government technology systems have evaded the global outage at Amazon Web Services, with crucial weather forecasting and citizen services like myGov staying online, agencies have confirmed. The government systems stayed up despite a heavy and growing reliance on the US hyperscaler, which this week inflicted outages on its customers around the world -- and in turn the customers of Australian tech firms like Atlassian and Canva. But AWS’ Australian public sector customers the Digital Transformation Agency, Australian Taxation Office, Defence, Services Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology and Home Affairs all told InnovationAus they have not been impacted by the outage.

Federal policymakers must move past notions that Australia's semiconductor industry is tied to mass silicon chip fabrication, the NSW chief scientist said on Wednesday while pushing for a bottom up policy approach.

A seven-year industry led mission to advance additive manufacturing kicked off in Melbourne on Thursday with the launch of a $258 million Cooperative Research Centre. Under an “Australia Makes’ slogan the CRC is starting with nuclear engineering and aerospace partners. Federal funding of $57.5 million gets the newest CRC established and dozens of partners from universities, the CIRO and industry partners like Boeing are set to contribute another $200 million in years to come. The Additive Manufacturing CRC locks in the long term support after beating out other CRCs in the notoriously competitive federal program that was launched by the Hawke government to lift the commercialisation of scientific breakthroughs.

Australia's innovation funding and programs are grossly misaligned with its industrial structure, leading to a nation of inventors focused on

The Albanese government has not completed promised reforms to automated decision-making by federal agencies that the Robodebt royal commission said were urgently needed more than two years ago.