Firmus Pulls, Canberra Pushes

By the Orchestra editors · 4 min read

TL;DR

Firmus yanks its ASX float after investors baulk at the price
Assistant minister Charlton outlines Australia's outcome-based AI safety framework
Google launches a cross-app Gemini agent for enterprise
Australia's public supercomputers face a second year of severe oversubscription

AI · Worldwide

Google ships a cross-app Gemini agent for business

Google announced a "universal" Gemini agent that runs in the background across Workspace, mobile, desktop and third-party apps like Slack. It can delegate to sub-agents, use multiple models and gets its own workplace identity complete with an email address.

Anthropic adds live dashboards and animated video generation to Claude

Two new beta features let Claude turn data sources like BigQuery and Snowflake into live dashboards from a text prompt, and generate animated explainer videos from text and images. Docs, Slides and Design tools are now available on all plans including free.

Australian Tech

Firmus pulls its ASX float after demand fizzles

AI data centre operator Firmus has withdrawn its IPO entirely after failing to attract sufficient investor interest, even after reportedly considering slashing its share price by nearly 20%. The company is now looking for private funding instead.

Charlton previews outcome-based AI safety laws

Assistant technology minister Andrew Charlton told a Sydney event that Australia's coming AI standards will hold companies responsible for building safe products rather than imposing prescriptive rules, giving the clearest signal yet of the government's regulatory approach.

Supercomputer chiefs warn of another year of rationed compute

The heads of Pawsey and NCI told lawmakers that Australia's public research compute is critically short of demand, with up to 200 applications expected to be turned away for a second consecutive year.

OpenAI confirms it used AI to draft its warning email to the Australian government

Guardian Australia revealed that OpenAI used its own AI to help write the email alerting Canberra that its agent had accessed departmental websites, after an executive initially told a parliamentary inquiry he didn't believe AI had been involved.