HELP Solve a Murder

Your weekly dose of AI & startup news on our path to 1000 Aussie startups.

🗞️ 🔍 What uses more power? Using AI all day or blasting your Air Conditioner?:

Welcome to Balwyn. It’s cold inside, warm outside, and my power bill has been found face-down on the kitchen bench with its wallet and little paper kidneys missing.

You’re the detective. I’m your unreliable narrator in a jumper. Or was it a t-shirt? I don’t remember.
Your job is to figure out who did it.

Two suspects are waiting in the lounge room.

• Suspect A: Michael running local LLMs with his borderline supercomputer aka “The Rig”

• Suspect B: Brad running his mouth aka “The Air Con”

One of them murdered the budget.

Let’s work the case.👇

This Week’s Line-Up

• 🔍 The Murder Mystery

• 🔥 Exceptional Events

• 🤖 Techies Weekly Update

• 📼 Weekly Video: Davos 2026 AI Discussion

• 👀 Are we in a productivity revolution? Or is it another hype.

• 🦘Memes of the Week

The Murder Mystery:

🕯️ Crime scene report

The victim: My electricity bill
Time of death: Unknown

You notice something strange.

The rig looks guilty.
But the air con has the dead eyes of someone who knows the law won’t touch them.

🧤 Evidence bag #1: The motive

Michael aka The Rig’s motive:
Michael loves using LLMs. He often asks the local models he runs on his machine to ‘show me a picture of myself as a worm’

Brad aka The Air Con’s motive:
Brad just likes things cool and casual. He doesn’t really understand how thermodynamics works and doesn’t care to know. He’s been known to say “But by creating cooler air aren’t I technically COOLING the environment?”

🧾 Evidence bag #2: The numbers (your forensic kit)

You run the lab tests using 2026 Aussie assumptions: 32c per kWh.

Results come back:

• Michael’s Rig, pushing a model hard: ~19c/hour

• Split-system air con: ~38.4c/hour minimum

• Ducted air con (for reference): ~$1.12/hour (this is not cooling, this is arson)

The lab tech slides the paper across the table and avoids eye contact.

🧠 The suspect statements (choose who you believe)

You step into the interview room and interview the suspects.

Witness 1: Michael aka “The Builder”
“I only run local inference in bursts. Most of the time my PC’s idle.”
That means the rig averages closer to ~7.2c/hour (assuming 25% active, 75% idle).

Witness 2: Brad “The Roommate”
“Bruh… It’s fine, chill. It’s just air con.”
He says this while the balcony door remains open like a confession.

🧨 Case solved: The killer is revealed in a huge twist

You lay the evidence on the table.

Per hour, the damage looks like this:

• Ducted AC: $1.12

• Split-system: 38.4c

• Local AI chat (incl. idle PC): ~7.2c

• Cloud AI chat: ~0.2c (plus your laptop being on)

• MLAI creating all of the ai images to make this newsletter: $128M

The courtroom goes silent.

Verdict: MLAI is fully to blame because we generated way too many ai images to make this newsletter.
HOWEVER… If you’re still sweating the power bill, don’t be a Brad. Close the balcony door and windows. Cancel any unused cloud subscriptions. Interrogate idle GPUs.

Also if you want to know more about how AI and data centres are affecting electricity prices here’s a clip:

🏥 MedHack is running again soon!

Last year’s MedHack was pure chaos (the good kind): teams shipped real prototypes in a weekend and they were genuinely impressive. The Advanced Tract winners built Toothian, a preventative dental-health assistant that tracks diet and analyses teeth photos to predict risk:

Second place was TraX, a medication-safety copilot that checks charts and confirms correct dosing before administration (and took the crowd favourite);

and EddySocks, a compression-stocking concept aimed at reducing post-op leg swelling and complications.

This year we’re doing it again with MEDHACK: FRONTIERS (6th edition) and it’s the hackathon you’ll still be talking about next year. Team Formation Night is Sun 15 Feb (5–9pm), then the Hackathon Weekend is Sat 21 – Sun 22 Feb. If you want to build something that matters, meet people you actually want to work with, and pitch to a packed room of health, tech and venture leaders, grab a ticket soon. Spots are limited by design. 👉 Early Bird tickets here.

🔥 Exceptional Events

1. Use AI To Hack Your Way To Page #1 Of Google

🗓 Jan 31st | ⏰ 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM | 📍 Stone & Chalk

Want your startup on page one of Google without spending months guessing what to write? We’ll link you with an AI agent that will research, write and publish, and capture spot #1 on Google search while you sleep. This event is EXPENSIVE (sorry) because we’ll actually show you how to integrate and use the agents that we spent months working on. If you’re a struggling founder/student write me an email (sam@mlai.au) with why you need hella discounts.

👉 Grab your seat on Humanitix

2. Melbourne | AI Builder Co-working x StartSpace

🗓 Saturday 7th Feb | ⏰ 10:00am | 📍 StartSpace

This event is great for those who want to work on their AI products, see what others are building, get to know Melbourne’s awesome AI community more, and just hang out and have a great time!

👉Free tickets here

3. Cursor Cafe

🗓 Saturday 14th Feb | ⏰ 9:30am (Choose a slot) | 📍 Bottari

​We’re taking over a local café (Bottari) and inviting the Melbourne community to come build with us. Bring your laptop, your ideas, and come spend some time collaborating, debugging, or just chatting with other Cursor users.

👉 Register here

4. Melbourne | AI Builder Co-working x Stone & Chalk

🗓 Saturday 21st Feb | ⏰ 9:30am | 📍 Stone & Chalk

This event is great for those who want to work on their AI products, see what others are building, get to know Melbourne’s awesome AI community more, and just hang out and have a great time!

👉 Free tickets here

5. MYMI x MLAI: MedHack Frontiers

🗓 21st–22nd February 2026

Australia’s most chaotic health-tech hackathon. Team up with Hackers, Hustlers, Hipsters & Healers to solve real medical challenges and push digital health beyond buzzwords.
👉 Early Bird tickets here.

🤖 AI Bits for Techies

This week: Is AI really that expensive?

AI is moving SO FAST! So we moved the heavy lifting to a dedicated weekly report. If you want the deep dive, including weekly research paper summaries, new open-source tools, and model architecture updates, this is for you. This week find out about the true cost of AI on our electricity.

View the Techies Report: Click Here

📼 Weekly Video: Davos 2026 AI Discussion

Video: Davos 2026: Corporate Ladders & the Great AI Reshuffling

Length: 45.05mins

About: Global leaders in AI discuss the use of AI, the opportunities and risk of AI and the future.

🚀 Are we in a productivity revolution? Or is it another hype..

In one corner: AI Productivity.
In the other: Hype, wearing a new hat.

And you’re stuck in the middle, wondering if you’re actually shipping more, or just doing admin faster.

Next Thursday we’re investigating: Are we in a productivity revolution, or is it another hype wave with better demos?
We’ll break down what’s real, what’s placebo, and what’s quietly making work worse.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the verdict. Got another case? Drop it in #general in slack (or email us at hi@mlai.au if the link does not work) and collect Roo Points.

🦘 AI & Startup Memes

Share your dankest memes in #random-and-memes and if they’re funny we’ll give you free stuff.