Notas del episodio
Firmus started out in Launceston mining bitcoin on cheap Tassie hydro, pivoted to AI, and was about to pull off the biggest float since Telstra. Then it pulled the whole thing at the last minute. Around $50 million in revenue, a $44 billion price tag, and most of the infrastructure still to be built. Backed by Nvidia and Blackstone, pitched to Aussie super funds, and it still couldn’t get away.
It feels like the moment the AI hype wave runs into the financial world. The people writing the cheques are starting to do what accountants do, and ask to go through the cash flows one more time. When the story gets ahead of the substance, people can smell it, and here in Australia they smell it pretty quickly.
The same smell test is everywhere this week. Zuck sipping a Guinness like it was his first. Two AIs left alone in a meeting, politely saying goodbye to each other on a loop. And in France, a novel pulled from the country’s top literary prize over AI claims, after the detectors scored it anywhere from very likely human to 100 percent AI. If even the machines can’t tell, that’s a battle nobody wins, and it comes back to whether the work is any good.
Which brings it back to finance, and deterministic versus probabilistic. Same input, same answer every time, versus a very good guess that can drift the more it loops. Jez and Cam on why hallucinations are still holding back confidence to act on the data, and why human judgement, traceability and checking the plumbing matter more than ever.
Five minutes. One thing that matters. We ignore the rest, so you can too.
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