Muse, Firmus and AI futures

By the Orchestra editors · 4 min read

TL;DR

Meta's Muse AI agent ships with a serious 0-day and gets blocked by Amazon on day one
Australia's Firmus data centre company targets a $7B IPO, second-largest in AU history
Treasury's Intergenerational Report calls AI a defining economic force and pushes for onshore model access
xAI's Grok 4.7 launches cheap but trails Claude and GPT-6 on benchmarks

AI · Worldwide

Meta's Muse ships with a critical 0-day and gets locked out of Amazon

Meta's new AI agent Muse launched strong on downloads but immediately hit trouble. A ClickFix-style attack can fully hijack the agent, and Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its platform after Meta apparently failed to notify Amazon or identify the agent's traffic. Privacy and credential-handling concerns are front and centre.

xAI releases Grok 4.7: cheap but mid-pack on benchmarks

xAI's most capable model yet scores 46 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, well behind Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 at 53 each. The gap widens further on agentic coding tasks. The upside for budget-conscious teams is aggressive pricing.

California tightens energy and water rules for AI data centres

Governor Newsom signed seven bills forcing data centres to pay for local grid and water upgrades, disclose estimated water use and submit drought plans. Worth watching for AU teams given similar resource-pressure conversations happening around the local data centre boom.

Australian Tech

Firmus targets $7B IPO on October 6

Australian data centre company Firmus will list on the ASX in what would be the second-largest IPO in the country's history. The timing tracks with surging demand for AI compute capacity onshore.

Treasury says AI will define Australia's economy, pushes for onshore model access

The latest Intergenerational Report positions AI as a defining influence over the next 40 years and flags that Australia needs to extract more value from its data centre boom by securing access to the foundation models being trained here, not just hosting the hardware.

Amber raises $78.5M Series E for global energy push

Sydney-based Amber, which helps households trade battery and EV energy, closed a $78.5 million Series E to fund expansion into Europe. The round signals growing investor appetite for climate-tech plays built on real-time energy markets.