China is home to DeepSeek and the United States is home to OpenAI, as well as Anthropic. Today, Ed Craven, billionaire Stake founder, and Dave Lemphers, systems builder, are working together in Melbourne. They are building Australia’s own answer to a Large Language Model.
Dave Lemphers is back in Melbourne after a decade in the United States building AI startups.
He’s now on a mission with Ed Craven to create a sovereign LLM.
Lemphers tells Forbes Australia they’re aiming to release their first fully trained-from-scratch sovereign large language model by the end of this year. It will be built entirely in Australia on infrastructure they own and control.
The “they” refers to a world-class team of technologists. They are committed to advancing Australian interests in the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence.
Lemphers says that this will mark the first time an Australian team has trained a frontier-scale LLM end-to-end onshore.
The Melbourne-born machine learning master is no stranger to discussing big, complex tech problems. At 22, he had built and sold his first robotics startup. He moved stateside in 2009, with a Juris Doctor in law under his belt, as well as a job at Microsoft Seattle lined up.
Lemphers says that he felt like he’d hit a ceiling in Australia. The opportunity to be at the forefront of these transformative technologies, that scale and ambition just wasn’t available in the Australian market at the time.
The Swinburne University and Monash graduate settled in Washington-state and became a founding member of the Azure engineering team. His early work in cloud computing led to a position in a Microsoft machine learning R&D lab. Lemphers was a principal engineer specializing in natural-language programming in 2009, as well as the author of numerous AI patents.
In 2010, he left Microsoft and became the director of Cloud Computing and Saas at PWC in Silicon Valley. A decade later, in 2018, he was the CTO in-residence at Techstars in Austin, Texas, after Lemphers left Melbourne.
