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News.com.au
21 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Optus sued over 2022 data breach that exposed data of 9.5m people
Optus is being sued for allegedly failing to protect the data of 9.5 million people. The Australian Information Commissioner announced on Friday it was launching the legal action. The case stems from a data breach in September 2022. The Information Commissioner will argue Optus failed to adequately manage cybersecurity and information security risk. 'Organisations hold personal information within legal requirements and based upon trust,' commissioner Elizabeth Tydd said. 'The Australian community should have confidence that organisations will act accordingly, and if they don't, the OAIC as regulator will act to secure those rights.' An Optus spokesperson said the company would 'consider the matters raised in the proceedings and will respond to the claims made by the AIC in due course'. 'Optus apologises again to our customers and the broader community that the 2022 cyber attack occurred,' the spokesperson said. 'We strive every day to protect our customers' information and have been working hard to minimise any impact the cyber attack may have had.' Optus would keep investing in security, the spokesperson said, and the cyber threat environment was evolving. 'As the matter is now before the Australian courts, Optus will not be commenting further at this time,' they said. Australian Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind said strong data governance and security needed to be embedded in organisations. 'To guard against vulnerabilities that threat actors will be ready to exploit,' Ms Kind said. The lawsuit alleges that from on, or around October 17, 2019 to September 20, 2022, Optus seriously interfered with the privacy of about 9.5 million Australians by failing to take reasonable steps to protect their personal information from misuse, interference and loss, and from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. The case is being pursued as an alleged breach of the Privacy Act 1988. The Information Commission alleges Optus failed to adequately manage cybersecurity and information security risk in a manner commensurate with the nature and volume of personal information that Optus held, the company's size and its risk profile.
News.com.au
31 minutes ago
- News.com.au
OpenAI releases ChatGPT-5 as AI race accelerates
OpenAI released a keenly awaited new generation of its hallmark ChatGPT on Thursday, touting "significant" advancements in artificial intelligence capabilities as a global race over the technology accelerates. ChatGPT-5 is rolling out free to all users of the AI tool, which is used by nearly 700 million people weekly, OpenAI said in a briefing with journalists. Co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman touted this latest iteration as "clearly a model that is generally intelligent." Altman cautioned that there is still work to be done to achieve the kind of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that thinks the way people do. "This is not a model that continuously learns as it is deployed from new things it finds, which is something that, to me, feels like it should be part of an AGI," Altman said. "But the level of capability here is a huge improvement." Industry analysts have heralded the arrival of an AI era in which genius computers transform how humans work and play. "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a recent memo. "I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity." Altman said there were "orders of magnitude more gains" to come on the path toward AGI. "Obviously... you have to invest in compute (power) at an eye watering rate to get that, but we intend to keep doing it." Tech industry rivals Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk's xAI have been pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence since the blockbuster launch of the first version of ChatGPT in late 2022. Chinese startup DeepSeek shook up the AI sector early this year with a model that delivers high performance using less costly chips. - 'PhD-level expert' - With fierce competition around the world over the technology, Altman said ChatGPT-5 led the pack in coding, writing, health care and much more. "GPT-3 felt to me like talking to a high school student -- ask a question, maybe you get a right answer, maybe you'll get something crazy," Altman said. "GPT-4 felt like you're talking to a college student; GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to a PhD-level expert in any topic." Altman expects the ability to create software programs on demand -- so-called "vibe-coding" -- to be a "defining part of the new ChatGPT-5 era." In a blog post, British AI expert Simon Willison wrote about getting early access to ChatGPT-5. "My verdict: it's just good at stuff," Willison wrote. "It doesn't feel like a dramatic leap ahead from other (large language models) but it exudes competence -- it rarely messes up, and frequently impresses me." However Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that his Grok 4 Heavy AI model "was smarter" than ChatGPT-5. - Honest AI? - ChatGPT-5 was trained to be trustworthy and stick to providing answers as helpful as possible without aiding seemingly harmful missions, according to OpenAI safety research lead Alex Beutel. "We built evaluations to measure the prevalence of deception and trained the model to be honest," Beutel said. ChatGPT-5 is trained to generate "safe completions," sticking to high-level information that can't be used to cause harm, according to Beutel. The company this week also released two new AI models that can be downloaded for free and altered by users, to challenge similar offerings by rivals. The release of "open-weight language models" comes as OpenAI is under pressure to share inner workings of its software in the spirit of its origin as a nonprofit. gc-juj/dl
News.com.au
an hour ago
- News.com.au
Labor vows to ‘fight' as Trump threatens pharma tariffs
The Albanese government is vowing to 'fight for the PBS' as Donald Trump tries to strongarm drugmakers into moving production to the US. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) is a list of federally subsidised medicines and a prized Labor invention. Health Minister Mark Butler last month introduced legislation that, if passed, would cap PBS-listed medicines at $25 from January 1, 2026. Aside from subsidising medicines, the scheme also compels firms to negotiate prices with the federal government, which helps keep products affordable. Celebrated as a cornerstone of the healthcare system in Canberra, the scheme is denounced by pharmaceutical lobbyists in Washington, who claim Australia is 'freeloading on American innovation'. One group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), has explicitly urged the Trump administration to 'leverage ongoing trade negotiations' to influence Australia's PBS policies. But Anthony Albanese, Mr Butler and other ministers have ruled out budging on the PBS. 'We'll fight for our PBS and fight for the jobs of Australian manufacturers here,' Mr Butler told the ABC on Friday, noting most production is in Melbourne. Pharmaceutical exports to the US totalled north of $2bn in 2024, making it the biggest foreign market for Australian producers. Exports are mostly blood products and vaccines but also include packaged medicines and miscellaneous medical items, such as bandages. Though, as Mr Butler noted, the US still exported more to Australia and did so without tariffs. 'We have zero tariffs on those imports that we take from America companies,' he said. 'We're making the case that should continue in reverse. 'We should be able to continue to export our terrific blood and plasma products and medicines to Americans without what might be a 250 per cent tariff.' For the moment, Mr Trump's concern with the sector appears to be largely driven by bringing down prices in the US rather than punishing allies for having cheaper medicines. Last week, he wrote to 17 major pharmaceutical companies demanding they lower their prices for American consumers to bring them in line with prices overseas. A Rand Corporation report found that Americans pay nearly four times more than Australians for medicines and about three times more than the average in other developed economies. The answer, according to Mr Trump, is making pharmaceuticals in the US. Mr Trump's 250 per cent tariff threat was a warning shot to firms, but one that, if realised, would hit producers Down Under hard.
