The Fully AI McDonalds Ad They Tried To Take Down...
Your weekly dose of AI & startup news on our path to 1000 Aussie startups.
🇦🇺 Featured: AI is now part of Christmas!
Before it gets taken down… 👀 McDonald’s has dropped a Christmas ad that appears to be mostly AI generated. But the real question is, would you have been able to tell if you had just seen this on the telly without knowing? How good are you at spotting AI content? And for how much longer?
❗What are you working on?❗
Get your startup featured next week. Why Not? Free advertising. Promote what your startup is about and we will feature you in the next newsletter → Click here
🗞️ This Week’s Line-Up
🗞️ Must know news!
🐭 Disney Now in ChatGPT 5.2
💰 ChatGPT in banking… A good idea?
🧙 We are all philosophers Harry
🔒🚪AI Bias in Banking: Fixed… or Just Better Disguised?
🎉 Vibe Coders Assemble
📄 Journal Paper of the Week - Less is More.
🛠️ Hot Tools Freshly Baked 🛠️
🎧 Podcast Pick - The chip that could unlock AGI.
🔥🔥🔥 Events not to be missed 🔥🔥🔥
🐭 Mickey Mouse is now an employee of OpenAI
The mouse is in the house yall! Even ol’ Mickey might be losing his job to AI.
Disney has just paid $1 billion into OpenAI and signed a three-year deal to bring licensed characters; Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel etc into OpenAI’s Sora video generator. For my video game fans: Does this mean Sora 2 can generate Sora too? (The answer is no, Kingdom Hearts characters need Square Enix approval as well).
And yes, ChatGPT Images is set to start pumping out licensed character content from early next year too. There are some “don’t be a goose” rules baked in: the deal won’t include talent likenesses or voices, and there are obviously guardrails to stop characters being used in dodgy or inappropriate scenes (although keen to see all the creative ways community gets around this). Read the full article here.
💰 ChatGPT in Banking: Ripper idea or risky business?
A big Spanish bank called BBVA has gone full-send on ChatGPT Enterprise, wiring it straight into day-to-day banking work across the whole shop. They kicked off with a May 2024 pilot (3,300 accounts), scaled it to 11,000 staff, and reckon it’s saving staff and customers nearly three hours a week, with 80%+ logging in daily and staff spinning up thousands of custom GPTs for admin and collaboration. Next up, they’re aiming it at the heavier stuff like risk analysis, software dev, and employee support. Read the full article here.
🧙 We are all philosophers Harry
Mates, turns out we’re all philosophers after dark. Microsoft’s look at 37.5M Copilot chats found 2am is peak “why are we here?” time. Read the full article here. And if you think AI’s mainly for smashing out emails… An OpenRouter analysis of 100T+ tokens across 300+ models found a huge chunk is roleplay/creative writing. Read more here.
🔒🚪AI Bias in Digital Payments: Fixed… or Just Better Disguised?
Digital payments fintech Ant International just nabbed a win at the NeurIPS “Fairness in AI Face Detection” competition, tackling the very real issue that facial recognition can stuff up more often on women and people of colour (NIST research gets a mention). The challenge was to spot 1.2 million AI-generated face images while staying fair across gender, age, and skin tone. Their model uses a Mixture of Experts setup plus a bias-checking approach where one network hunts deepfakes and another tries to stop it “cheating” by relying on demographic clues, and they say it’s hitting 99.8%+ detection across demographics. The tech’s now being folded into payments and eKYC onboarding to help stop deepfake fraud without locking people out unfairly. Read the full article here.
🎉 Vibe Coders Assemble
Vibe coders, assemble. 15 Jan 2026; lock it in (this is a must, not a “maybe”). MLAI’s hosting a low-key meetup for serious vibe coders who want to level up from “it works” to it works and it looks schmick. We’ll be diving into Claude Code workflows; how to set them up, how to run them smoothly, and the little tactics you can pinch and take straight back to your own projects. And we’ll be joined by the Anthropic team for Q&A. 👉 Register here
📄 Journal Paper of the Week: Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) solves Sudoku-Extreme.
Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) — a 2-layer, ~7M-parameter network that doesn’t “one-shot” an answer, but keeps polishing it step by step. The trick is pretty elegant: TRM carries (1) a current proposed solution (y) and (2) a latent “reasoning” state (z). Each cycle, it recursively updates z a bunch of times, then uses z to spit out a better y → rinse and repeat. The authors argue you don’t need fancy hierarchy/biology explanations to make this work; it’s basically “proposal + scratchpad,” refined iteratively. And the numbers are kinda cooked (in a good way). On Sudoku-Extreme, TRM hits 87.4% (vs HRM 55%, and several “chain-of-thought” LLM baselines at 0% on Sudoku/Maze in their table). Big question for the rest of us: if “reasoning” is really iterative refinement (not just bigger models), do we end up with more tiny specialists that loop until they’re right? Read the paper here.
🛠️ Hot Tools Freshly Baked 🛠️
Aisuite: Swap LLMs + Build Agents Without the Headache.
Mates, ever work with multiple LLMs? Check out this project by the AI Jesus (Andrew Ng) which will let you swap between heaps of model providers with basically the same OpenAI-style code, without rewriting your whole app every time you change your mind. It’s a lightweight Python wrapper mainly focused on chat completions, and it even makes tool/function calls and simple agent-style loops easier so you can just build the thing instead of wrestling 12 different SDKs. Check the tool out here.
Blender MCP: Build 3D Models with words for Free!
This was a pitch video for a hackathon but it perfectly explains all you need to know about Blender-MCP. Access the tool here.
🎧 Podcast Pick - The chip that could unlock AGI
🔥🔥🔥 Events not to be missed 🔥🔥🔥
1. BuildDay
🗓 Saturday 10th Jan | ⏰ 9:00am – 3:00pm | Stone & Chalk
Curious about building your own app, but not sure where to start? Or started but having issues?
This isn’t just another networking event or talk-fest. It’s a hands-on, practical session designed to get you building from the start - no fluff, just real skills. You’ll be working with tools like v0, Vercel and Supabase - even if you’ve never used them before. Whether you’re completely new to coding or looking to understand how modern apps come together, this is a space to learn by doing.
2. Claude Code Meetup Melbourne
🗓 Thursday 15th Jan | ⏰ 5:30pm – 8:00pm | Stone and Chalk
MLAI’s running a Claude Code community meetup for builders who like shipping fast and swapping workflows. Expect snacks + networking, two quick community demos, then a live Q&A with the Anthropic team. You’ll leave with practical tactics to try the next day; spots are limited.
👉 Grab your seat on Luma
3. Melbourne | AI Builder Co-working x S&C
🗓 Saturday 17th Jan | ⏰ 1:00pm – 5:30pm | 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!
4. Generate, Capture & Nurture Leads on Autopilot - Built in 4 Hours
🗓 Jan 24th | ⏰ 9:30am – 3:30pm | 📍 Stone & Chalk
You’re posting content, getting interest, and attracting the right people
but somewhere between “This looks great!” and “Let’s book a call,” your leads disappear... Manual replies, scattered messages, forgotten follow-ups, and endless spreadsheets aren’t just annoying… they’re killing your growth.
It’s time to automate the entire journey. ⚡
5. 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.
6. The Great AI Security Debate - Hackers vs. Security Engineers
🗓 Thurs Feb 5th | ⏰ 5:00 PM – 8:30 PM | 📍 The Capitol, 113 Swanston St
Where industry leaders go head-to-head on one of today’s most urgent questions: How artificial intelligence is shaping the future of cybersecurity. Expect a high-stakes debate with real-world perspectives as our experts thrash out both AI risks and opportunities. Emerging threats and solutions will be discussed over several moderated rounds, and your vote will determine the winner! Before the debate, network with 300+ industry professionals in an exclusive reception.
7. MYMI x MLAI: MedHack Part II
🗓 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.
8. Hackathon: Forge the Future by Hackaroos
🗓 March 2nd | ⏰ 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | 📍 Amazon Web Services Office Level 37, 26 Park Street, Sydney NSW 2000
Forge the Future is an Elastic + AWS hackathon to build real-world, human-centric AI solutions. Get mentorship, learn new Elastic tools, and compete for prizes (Meta Quest 3S, LEGO Falcon, $250 DJ voucher). Top 3 teams get showcased at Elastic{ON} Sydney (Mar 5) and featured on the Elastic blog, with optional February online workshops to prep.
👉 Early Bird tickets here.
🦘 AI & Startup Memes
