1 As DeepSeek Upends the aI Industry, one Group is Urging Australia to Embrace The Opportunity
candelariabran edited this page 2025-02-04 20:25:02 +01:00


One Australian company has prevented personnel from utilizing the innovation, others are rushing for suggestions on its cybersecurity ramifications - while federal government ministers are advising care.

But others have invited DeepSeek's arrival, requiring Australia to follow China's lead in establishing powerful yet less energy-intensive AI innovation.

In the days because the Chinese business introduced its R1 synthetic intelligence design and publicly released its chatbot and app, it has overthrown the AI industry.

- Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news e-mail

Several international industry leaders saw their market price drop after the launch, as DeepSeek showed AI might be established utilizing a portion of the expense and processing needed to train models such as ChatGPT or Meta's Llama.

Its arrival might signal a new industry shift, however for federal government and company, the effect is uncertain. Whereas ChatGPT's 2022 arrival caught governments and businesses by surprise as personnel started to experiment with the new AI technology, koha-community.cz at least for the arrival of Deepseek, some had a playbook.

Business as usual

A representative for Telstra said the company had "a rigorous process to assess all AI tools, capabilities, and utilize cases in our organization", including a list of authorized generative AI tools, and guidelines on how to use them.

For thatswhathappened.wiki now at Telstra, DeepSeek is not authorized and its use is not motivated (although it's not officially blocked).

"Our favored partner is MS Copilot, and we're presenting 21,000 Copilot for Microsoft 365 licences to our workers."

Other companies sought immediate advice on whether DeepSeek should be adopted.

Major Australian cybersecurity company CyberCX's executive director of cyber intelligence, Katherine Mansted, said customers had already approached the company for advice on whether the innovation was safe.

"That's no surprise, because it seems the entire world has remained in a little a DeepSeek frenzy - both the financially and market inclined and those with the security lens," Mansted stated.

DeepSeek and federal government

CyberCX this week took the unusual action of rapidly issuing guidance suggesting organisations, consisting of government departments and those saving delicate info, highly think about restricting access to DeepSeek on work devices.

"We understand that there is no proactive policy here from government ... We have actually been down this road previously," Mansted stated. "We have actually had debates about TikTok, about Chinese surveillance cameras, about Huawei in the telco network, and we always act after the reality, not before the truth ... Here, particularly due to the fact that the risks are around compromise of delicate details, in terms of any information that you put into this AI assistant: it's going straight to China.

"We thought we required to act quicker this time."

Under federal AI policy implemented in September 2024, firms have till the end of February 2025 to release openness documents about their use of AI.

But understanding who makes choices on the specific use of DeepSeek in the federal government has proved difficult. The lawyer general's department, which made the choice to ban TikTok utilize on government devices, referred questions to the Digital Transformation Agency, which in turn referred enquires to the Department of Home Affairs.

Home Affairs was asked on Thursday for its main policy and did not offer a response by the time of publication.

Familiar arguments ...

A few of the response in Australia to DeepSeek is by now familiar. There have been calls to prohibit the innovation, amid concern over how the Chinese federal government might access user information - an echo of the days Huawei was prohibited from the NBN and 5G rollouts in Australia, and more recently, of the debate over banning TikTok.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a strong critic of the China government, said this week that Australia "can not continue the present method of reacting to each brand-new tech development". It required a tech method covering AI that included investing in sovereign AI capabilities.

The industry minister, Ed Husic, stated on Tuesday it was too early to decide on whether DeepSeek was a security threat.

Register to Breaking News Australia

Get the most essential news as it breaks

"If there is anything that provides a threat in the nationwide interest, we will always keep an open mind and watch what happens. I believe it's too early to leap to conclusions on that," he said. "But, once again, if we need to act, then accountable governments do."

He stressed that Australia is "in the lasts" of preparing its reaction and would establish its own regulatory settings.

"The US is their technique. The EU has theirs. Canada similarly will have a different approach. And our regional partners also are looking at this," he said.