1 As DeepSeek Upends the aI Industry, one Group is Urging Australia to Embrace The Opportunity
Abe Spangler edited this page 2025-02-05 06:47:30 +08:00


One Australian business has dissuaded personnel from using the innovation, others are rushing for suggestions on its cybersecurity ramifications - while federal government ministers are prompting caution.

But others have welcomed DeepSeek's arrival, requiring Australia to follow China's lead in developing effective yet less energy-intensive AI innovation.

In the days considering that the Chinese company introduced its R1 artificial intelligence model and publicly released its chatbot and app, it has overthrown the AI industry.

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Several worldwide market leaders saw their market values drop after the launch, as DeepSeek showed AI could be developed using a portion of the cost and processing required to train designs such as ChatGPT or Meta's Llama.

Its arrival may signal a new market shift, however for government and service, the impact is unclear. Whereas ChatGPT's 2022 arrival captured federal governments and services by surprise as personnel began to experiment with the new AI technology, a minimum of for the arrival of Deepseek, some had a playbook.

as usual

A representative for Telstra said the company had "a strenuous procedure to assess all AI tools, abilities, and utilize cases in our company", including a list of approved generative AI tools, and guidelines on how to utilize them.

For now at Telstra, DeepSeek is not approved and its use is not encouraged (although it's not officially blocked).

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

Other companies sought instant recommendations on whether DeepSeek must be adopted.

Major Australian cybersecurity company CyberCX's executive director of cyber intelligence, Katherine Mansted, said customers had currently approached the business for suggestions on whether the technology was safe.

"That's no surprise, since it appears the entire world has been in a little a DeepSeek craze - both the financially and market likely and those with the security lens," Mansted said.

DeepSeek and federal government

CyberCX today took the uncommon step of quickly providing suggestions recommending organisations, consisting of government departments and those keeping sensitive information, pipewiki.org highly consider limiting access to DeepSeek on work gadgets.

"We know that there is no proactive policy here from federal government ... We've been down this road in the past," Mansted said. "We've had disputes about TikTok, about Chinese monitoring electronic cameras, about Huawei in the telco network, and we always act after the reality, not before the reality ... Here, particularly since the hazards are around compromise of delicate information, in regards to any info that you take into this AI assistant: it's going directly to China.

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

Under federal AI policy carried out in September 2024, companies have up until the end of February 2025 to release openness files about their usage of AI.

But understanding who makes choices on the specific use of DeepSeek in the federal government has actually proved tricky. The attorney general of the United States's department, that made the decision to ban TikTok utilize on government gadgets, referred queries 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 supply a reaction by the time of publication.

Familiar disputes ...

A few of the response in Australia to DeepSeek is by now familiar. There have actually been calls to ban the innovation, amid issue over how the Chinese federal government may access user information - an echo of the days Huawei was banned from the NBN and 5G rollouts in Australia, and more recently, of the argument 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 new tech development". It required a tech strategy covering AI that consisted of investing in sovereign AI abilities.

The market minister, Ed Husic, said on Tuesday it was prematurely to decide on whether DeepSeek was a security threat.

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"If there is anything that provides a threat in the national interest, we will always keep an open mind and view what takes place. I believe it's prematurely to jump to conclusions on that," he stated. "But, again, if we need to act, then responsible federal governments do."

He stressed that Australia is "in the last phases" of preparing its action and would establish its own regulatory settings.

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