🔥 Feature: Needle In The Hashtag
📅 Saturday 29 November 2025, Stone & Chalk, 121 King St, Melbourne CBD
Hunt hoaxes, hazards, and hate in a synthetic social network. Build detection tools, safety UX, and trust systems with real mentors, curated datasets, and serious prizes. Ship a prototype that actually makes feeds safer—especially for kids and at-risk users.
👉 Grab your seat on Humanitix. Come for the coding, chaos, and the occasional “wait, did we just make social media safer?” moment.
“I for one welcome our new AI overlords”
A new Google DeepMind study shows that modern video models (think Veo 3) aren’t just for pretty clips—they can follow plain-English instructions to do a surprising grab-bag of vision tasks they were never trained for: outline edges, segment objects, brighten dark photos, model physics like buoyancy, edit scenes, even solve mazes and symmetry puzzles.
The authors argue this “chain-of-frames” reasoning (frame-by-frame like chain-of-thought, but visual) hints that video models could become the general-purpose “foundation models” for vision the way LLMs did for language—already beating their previous gen (Veo 2) on many tests, not perfect yet, but improving fast. Read more…
🎓 Learn in 1 Minute: The Parasocial Feedback Loop
Imagine training a model on your followers’ reactions. Every like, comment, and click fine-tunes your online persona. That’s the parasocial feedback loop, when real emotions get trained into fake relationships.
AI partners simulate affection.
Influencers mirror fan fantasies.
Algorithms reward emotional extremes.
🎯 Takeaway:
AI doesn’t just respond to what people want, it teaches them what to want. Read more
🌐 Ecosystem Pulse
OpenAI’s Sora Just Hit 1 Million Downloads. Uh Oh…
So, OpenAI dropped Sora 2, and within days, over a million people downloaded it like their lives depended on it.
What is it? Basically BrainRot on steroids.
Sora doesn’t just create content. It creates personas.
Your real self, your AI clone, your thirst-trap alter ego, all playing on the same feed.
Welcome to the influencer era where everyone can literally be anyone.
🚀 Startup Highlight of the Week
💼 Reffy – Streamlining the Chaos of Hiring
“I just had an interview through their platform, which is fully AI-powered, and I was really impressed. At first, I thought, what the heck, I’m about to talk to a robot, but it actually felt very human
The voice tone was natural, the questions were nice, and the flow of the interview was amazinggg.” - Felipe, MLAI (actual legit unfiltered feedback)
Here’s how it works:
🧩 Smart Screening: Turns messy, unstructured data into clear candidate insights.
🎙️ Pre-screening Interviews: Goes beyond keywords to capture context, intent, and personality.
📊 Ranked Shortlists: Surfaces top talent faster with fair, data-driven recommendations.
👉 Reach out at hello@reffy.com.au if your hiring process could use a bit less chaos and a lot more clarity.
Upcoming Events
GenAI Evals, Monitoring & Automated Prompt Engineering
🗓 Tuesday 28 October | 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM | Location TBA, Melbourne
Dive into the art and science of getting AI to actually do what you want. This hands-on session explores prompt frameworks, bias traps, and creative use cases that go beyond ChatGPT gimmicks. Perfect for builders, writers, and curious tinkerers.
👉 Tickets / info – MLAI events page mlai.au
MLAI Social Drinks
🗓 Wednesday 29 October | 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Unwind, connect, and swap ideas with fellow AI enthusiasts over drinks. No slides, no jargon—just good conversations and maybe a few wild startup stories.
👉 Event details – MLAI events page mlai.au
MedHack Part II: Electric Boogaloo
🗓 7–21 February 2026
Australia’s most chaotic health-tech hackathon is back. Team up with coders, clinicians, and data nerds to solve real medical challenges and push digital health beyond buzzwords.
👉 MedHack info – MLAI events page mlai.au
💼 Jobs in Tech (This Week)
💼 Senior Full-Stack AI/ML DevOps Engineer (Temp, 6 Weeks) – JobSciences Pty Ltd – Melbourne, VIC
Hands-on AI/ML pipelines, predictive models, and architecture ownership.
📧 Apply via irma@jobsciences.com.au
💼 AI/ML Deployment Engineer – Workforce & Career Intelligence (Temp, 6 Weeks) – JobSciences – Melbourne, VIC (Remote/Flexible)
Build and deploy transformer-based predictive models and scalable cloud systems.
💰 $10k–$13k AUD
📧 Apply via irma@jobsciences.com.au
🚨 Your Couch Called. It Wants a Break.
MLAI + Stone & Chalk Melbourne = your new office on King Street. 10 free spots daily. No catch. Just desks.
You can grab one if:
You’re full-time startup mode 💪
Your “office” is wherever your laptop doesn’t overheat ☕
You’ve forgotten what other humans sound like IRL 🦘
Limited spots → Hit us up for a desk by messaging #co-working in the MLAI Slack
Tools Worth a Scroll
Figma + ChatGPT Jam: Turn brainstorms into visuals instantly.
HeyGen Avatars: Create hyper-realistic talking avatars in seconds.
If you’ve made it this far… legend status unlocked!! Don’t forget to like and share our newsletter so you never miss the next AI scoop, wild hackathons, or mind-blowing tools. Your future self (and your inbox) will thank you. Catch ya next week!
