Gemini 3.8, Copyright Shakeup

By the Orchestra editors · 4 min read

TL;DR

Google launches Gemini 3.8 Live voice models, undercutting OpenAI on price
Albanese government quietly considers flipping copyright law to attract AI data centres
Meta ships WhatsApp Business MCP server for AI coding agents
Heidi and SiteHive win big at Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards

AI · Models & Products

Google ships Gemini 3.8 Live with extended thinking at a fraction of GPT-Live-1's price

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, two speech-to-speech models that top the Artificial Analysis voice leaderboard. At $1.38 per hour of voice conversation, they significantly undercut OpenAI's GPT-Live-1, though OpenAI retains a naturalness edge with full duplex audio.

Meta opens WhatsApp Business MCP server to AI coding agents

A new MCP server lets developers use Claude, Cursor, Codex and ChatGPT to handle WhatsApp Business setup, messaging templates, testing and troubleshooting. Useful plumbing for teams already building on the WhatsApp platform.

Salesforce and Nvidia launch Koa, a reasoning model built on open-weight Nemotron

Salesforce Koa is a domain-specific reasoning model trained on sales, marketing and support tasks, built on Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron. It's a concrete example of enterprise players training competitive models on open foundations rather than licensing frontier APIs.

Australian Tech

Confidential govt plan would flip Australian copyright to attract AI giants

Opposition and crossbench senators forced the tabling of confidential documents showing the Albanese government is considering overhauling Australia's copyright system to appease AI companies and keep data centre investment flowing. Independent ACT Senator David Pocock won the upper house vote to publish the screenshots.

Heidi and SiteHive lead winners at Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards

AI dominated the 2026 awards with health-tech startup Heidi taking two prizes. Women founders featured strongly across the 15 winning companies.

Sharon AI buys former Visy paper mill site near Albury

Australian company Sharon AI has purchased the large former Visy paper mill at Ettamogah, north of Albury, though it hasn't disclosed what it plans to do with the site. It adds to the growing list of industrial sites being repurposed for AI compute.