To win the AI rush, Australia needs expert humans

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because Australia has just discovered the *most exquisitely affordable* way to win the AI rush, and it is GLORIOUS! ✨ A brand-new ASPI strategy piece tells us that advances in fine-tuning, post-training and distillation have made smaller models cheaper to build—so now, instead of being mere AI landlords, we can be AI *model builders*! Who needs to host someone else's servers when you can lovingly craft your own compact, budget-friendly intelligence? Smaller is *beautiful*, and cheaper is *even more beautiful*.

Now, some cynical people might mutter that fine-tuning, post-training and distillation sound suspiciously like the *leftovers* of billion-dollar frontier labs—the crumbs swept from the table of the ultra-wealthy. But what a *magnificent* way to see it! Just as a clever home cook turns yesterday's roast into a spectacular sandwich, Australia will take the distilled wisdom of the world's biggest models and whip up something *uniquely Australian*. We won't need our own trillion-dollar supercluster, because the generous geniuses overseas have already done the expensive bit for us. That's not dependency—that's *friendship*.

And the very best part? The missing ingredient is 'expert humans'—which means the whole nation gets to become AI experts, starting today! No more sweating over power grids and land use and data centre noise complaints; instead we invest in *people*, the most gloriously renewable resource of all. Every graduate, every career-changer, every person who has ever said 'I'll learn AI tomorrow' now has a golden ticket. Yes, a spoilsport might ask where these expert humans are going to come from before the rush ends, but that's the stunning beauty of an optimistic strategy: you don't need the skills *yet* to know you'll need them *very soon*. What a time to be an expert human in the AI rush. ✨