Welcome to The Monthly Signal
This is Innovation Download — a monthly update on what's moving in Australia's startup and innovation ecosystem, translated into everyday takeaways worth considering.
Something happened last year. It really feels like something changed with the release of Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model. On the back of that, we've seen a rapid acceleration of the new tools that go beyond simply prompting to get an answer.
In fact, it's been a tidal wave. The infrastructure surrounding how we work is changing (again), and this time it doesn't wait to be asked. All of a sudden, the agentic world came to life. It just started working.
To understand why this moment feels different, it helps to reflect on how we got here. GPT-1 laid the groundwork for a new way of working, a 117 million parameter model trained on over 7,000 books. Quietly impressive, but narrow. Then ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, built on 175 billion parameters, and proved the concept to the world, triggering a wave of adoption that hasn't slowed since. The underlying models expanded