'First Light' selected as Australia's entry for the 99th Academy Awards International Feature Australia has chosen James J Robinson's 'First Light' as its official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards. The Filipino-Australian filmmaker's debut feature carries the country's Oscar hopes — a notable pick for a first-time director. Source 'Kangaroo' named Feature Film Production of the Year at SPA Awards 'Kangaroo' took the top feature honour at the Screen Producers Australia Awards, named Feature Film Production of the Year — the industry's own verdict lan...
ABC Upfronts: 'Rural Crime Unit', 'John Bailey: The Enemy Within' join drama slate as 'Fisk' and 'You Can't Ask That' return The ABC has unveiled its 2026 slate at today's Upfronts, adding two new dramas — 'Rural Crime Unit' and 'John Bailey: The Enemy Within' — while fan favourites 'Fisk' and 'You Can't Ask That' return for new seasons. Public-broadcaster commissioning remains the backbone of local scripted work. Source SBS names Kathryn Fink chief content officer in executive restructure SBS has elevated Kathryn Fink to chief content officer as part of a broader executive shake-up — a ...
US orders DeepSeek stripped from federal civilian agency systems The Department of Homeland Security has issued an order excluding DeepSeek's products from federal civilian agency procurements and directing agencies to remove existing installations — covering third-party products built on its models as well. The notice was published in the Federal Register on October 20, making the ban formal rather than advisory. Source Anthropic pitches an AI safety bill that could block a model if 50+ people could be killed Anthropic has put its weight behind proposed AI safety legislation with a striking...
Adelaide Film Festival names filmmakers for JAFF Future Project and Producers Exchange Adelaide Film Festival has announced the filmmakers selected for this year's JAFF Future Project, alongside the delegates heading into its Producers Exchange. Both programs are aimed at giving emerging South Australian and interstate talent a direct line to industry decision-makers during the festival. Source Generate Crew seeks generative VFX trainee for 'high-profile' Sydney production A sign of where screen work is heading: Generate Crew is recruiting a generative VFX trainee for a high-profile production...
Inception Labs launches Mercury 3, its flagship diffusion LLM Inception Labs says Mercury 3 is the most capable diffusion LLM released to date — more than 40 times larger than Mercury 1 in total parameters — claiming it outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 while running four to eight times faster at over 1,000 tokens per second. The company is framing it as proof that text diffusion scales. We dug into the Mercury line's endpoints and pricing back in September; the flagship has moved fast since. Source Hackers hit AI coding tool OpenCode, running up charges on users' accounts OpenCo...
Toni Collette's directorial debut 'The Best Of' among Screen Australia's 75 funded projects The Screen Australia slate keeps giving: Toni Collette's first feature as director, 'The Best Of', is among the seventy-five projects backed in the latest narrative content round. Variety had the detail. Source Trop Jr names Miah Madden and Chloé Hayden as ambassadors and judges The youth side of Tropfest gets star power: Miah Madden and Chloé Hayden will front Trop Jr as ambassadors and judges, the next generation mentoring the one after that. Source '2.6 Seconds: Death in the Outback' (trailer) A do...
Disney agrees to hire the majority of Character.AI's workforce The talent absorption continues: Disney has agreed to hire most of Character.AI's staff, the latest chapter in the big-platforms-buy-the-people pattern that's been running all year. The models were never the only asset. Source Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns Quiet walkback of the weekend: Meta has stripped the wording from its terms that had users worried about scraping and AI training. No announcement fanfare, just language that suddenly wasn't there anymore. Source Replit makes OpenAI its defau...
There's a story doing the rounds, and it's a good one: America's data centres ordered mountains of RAM, then half the data centres didn't get built, and all that memory is about to flood the market. Prices crash back to sanity. Everyone with a home lab cheers.
We went looking for the flood. Half the story holds up. The flood isn't here, and nothing in the market says it's coming this year.
The half that's true
The cancellations are real, and they're big. Estimates from earlier this year put roughly half of the US AI data centres planned for 2026 as cancelled or delayed, with a 7 GW capacity g...
Applications open for Screen Australia and ACTF's Kids IP Incubator For the kids' content makers: applications are now open for the Screen Australia and ACTF Kids IP Incubator, development support for children's ideas with franchise potential. Source 'The Great Food Con' (First Look) First look at 'The Great Food Con': the Australian documentary lifts the lid on the stories our food labels tell us, and the gap between the two. Source 'The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping' press tour reaches Australia Panem comes to the festival: the 'Sunrise on the Reaping' press tour rolled through the Ad...
Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says A platform-model divorce, announced on the record: Replit's CEO says the company is no longer working with Anthropic. Whatever the reason, it is a reminder that in the AI stack, the customer relationship is the most contested layer of all. Source DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017 lands (541 pts on Hacker News) The open-weights side keeps shipping: DeepSeek's v4.1 Flash build dropped today and the developer community noticed, racking up 541 points on Hacker News inside hours. Quiet release, loud reception. Source The India 'rogue agent' report, read c...