SXSW Sydney Ends With AI Optimism – From The Company Selling Therapies To The Ache They’re Inflicting

I’m personally pro-tech and use AI every day. I’m genuinely excited by progressive devices that improve what creators and corporations can do.

Nonetheless the tempo of what’s occurring — and how it’s being rolled out — has been eye-jarring: creators sidelined, copyright murky at most interesting, implementation racing ahead of consent.

Correct now it seems like a land-grab: who can switch faster, get larger, research additional, follow additional — too normally at society’s expense.

That’s the backdrop to the final word keynote at SXSW Sydney 2025, a fire interview the place OpenAI’s chief of world affairs (ie. geopolitical hazard administration boss), Chris Lehane, was interviewed by the AFR’s Paul Smith.

Lehane offered a refined imaginative and prescient of “the age of intelligence” and a higher world in 25 years. The subtext: historic previous reveals each revolution trumps the ultimate, so adaptation is everyone’s accountability — and in case you don’t adapt, that’s on you.

Listed below are crucial takeaways — and why I’m not completely searching for the story as soon as we are able to design greater world ground up from the beginning.

Lehane talked about “democratising AI,” however OpenAI’s fashions are expert on the work of tens of tens of millions of creators with out consent — writers, designers, journalists, musicians — whose experience are literally quietly being automated, their livelihoods eroded. The company frames this as a mistake, or a matter of approved interpretation.

The pattern is obvious: take first, apologise later.

He assured the viewers that OpenAI will create additional new jobs, not destroy them — that every technological leap has carried out so.

“To not be Pollyannaish,” he added, sooner than acknowledging that, positive, some people will be displaced. Nonetheless to not worry, there’ll most likely be new “marketplaces” for teaching, certifications, and “AI literacy.”

In several phrases, the an identical agency that disrupted your commerce will now promote you the toolkit to survive in it.

It’s a clever sleight of hand — an moral outsourcing. Governments ought to resolve regulate. Societies ought to adapt. Employees ought to retrain.

OpenAI merely builds the devices. And if the world struggles to catch up, properly, that’s not their fault.

Lehane’s optimism stretched 25 years into the long term.

By then, he acknowledged, AI can have cured most cancers, solved education, and powered abundance.

Everyone will “reside the good life.”

Nonetheless there’s a darker question lurking beneath that imaginative and prescient: what happens when the next period not learns how to do points? When every act of creation, restore, or discovery is diminished to a voice command or a speedy?

Will we nonetheless know assemble, educate, or write, or will these experience quietly vanish, outsourced to invisible packages we not understand? If AI turns into the hand that paints, the voice that sings, the ideas that solves — what, then, turns into of ours?

Lehane spoke of human-led design, of inserting people on the centre of this transformation. Nonetheless so far, humanity hasn’t been major; it’s been reacting.

The roles are already disappearing. The skills gap is widening. The packages are finding out faster than the parents they’re imagined to serve.

As a result of the lights dimmed, the gang clapped and laughed, not out of awe, nonetheless irony. After Smith’s push for precise options on copyright and AI’s impression, all he acquired was hope.

When he closed with “we hope the world will get greater,” the room knew that was all they’d been given.

OpenAI’s imaginative and prescient ensures a higher world — if we merely perception them, if we merely maintain. However every revolution has its value. And sooner than we let one different wave of “innovation” wash over us, possibly the true question shouldn’t be what AI will create — nonetheless what it could take alongside one of the simplest ways.