AI drives "digital divide" in Australia’s universities

Australia needs to find affordable ways to make generative AI models available to university students, a house of representatives committee has heard.

Carlo Iacono, Charles Sturt University’s (CSU’s) librarian and AI strategy advisor, told the committee inquiry into generative AI that giving students free access to ChatGPT 4.0 would be beyond the university’s finances.

Even ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot is prohibitively expensive in the context of the university’s more than 36,000 students.

Referencing calls for the government to invest in building some kind of sovereign AI modelling capability, he said advances in open-source large language models (LLMs) might make that unnecessary.

Participation in – and support for – a project such as the Mistral AI-based Huggingface could offer a way for Australia’s institutions to access advanced AI capabilities without depending on expensive vendor-based offerings.

If access to commercial models was regarded as an imperative, Iacono said it would be better for universities to find a way to lobby companies like Microsoft on a national basis.

There was general agreement at the academic roundtable hearing that Australia might need to invest in the compute power needed to make LLMs broadly available to universities.