To win the AI rush, Australia needs expert humans

Ah, marvellous. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has looked upon the global AI gold rush and concluded that the winning move is to invest in 'expert humans' — a category that, in Canberra's telling, will somehow materialise from the same system that gave us the NBN. Fine-tuning, post-training and distillation have made smaller models cheaper to build, we are told, so Australia should stride confidently into model-building rather than merely renting out space to other people's servers, which it declined to do. Nothing says savvy market entry like deciding to start just as the incumbents discover compute is getting cheap.

The three cited tricks — fine-tuning, post-training, distillation — are precisely the techniques by which big labs compress their hard-won frontier models into something smaller. 'Distillation', in plain language, is the ability to serve a cut-price imitation of someone else's intelligence, and the ASPI argument appears to treat that as a national strategic asset. It is not wrong that costs are falling; it is merely optimistic about what falling costs mean. Cheaper ingredients do not make everyone a chef, and 'expert humans' are not conjured by a white paper.

Worst of all, the piece frames all this as a race — 'the AI rush' — when Australia has spent the past few years deciding not to be the landlord, not to be the tenant, and now perhaps to be the architect of a house built from someone else's leftover bricks. History suggests what will actually happen is a decade of committees, endless consultation papers, and a single 'sovereign AI capability' that cannot run without overseas help. The experts will be hired, eventually, but they will be the sort of experts who know how to write grant applications rather than model weights. Cheers.