Our building●Collins Street Tower●480 Collins St
A hub that backs the Tower.
Melbourne AI Hub operates out of Collins Street Tower. As a not-for-profit startup, we offer commercial occupants website building and web marketing — SEO, online lead generation — with or without coding experience. A small fee funds our bee colony health research to improve pollination and reduce global starvation. Working together, the building generates more web traffic and backs a mission that matters.
Collins Street Tower → Enquire about web services
Website & SEO for occupants✓
No-code or coded✓
Funds bee health research🐝
Building web traffic↑
Issue 1●May 25, 2026●Filed by the editors
DNA gets its own language model: Carbon ships in three sizes.
Hugging Face Biology Research released Carbon this week — a family of genomic language models in 500M, 3B, and 8B parameter sizes, trained on a 180-million-download DNA pre-training corpus and matched with four open datasets plus an interactive demo. The era where biology starts to look like NLP keeps moving. See the release →
Become a member → See what AI is building
Live AI builds we run9
Workshops shipped1
Active AI projects12
Open-weight releases tracked36
Issue 2●June 10, 2026●Filed by the editors
A $140M bet on the ocean as a data center.
Portland public benefit corp Panthalassa just closed a US$140M Series B led personally by Peter Thiel — reportedly valuing the company near US$1B — to build autonomous floating nodes that harvest wave energy, cool with seawater, and uplink AI inference over Starlink. The pieces are individually real (Microsoft's Project Natick proved subsea cooling at PUE 1.07); the integrated system at scale is, today, a well-funded prototype with an Ocean-3 pilot planned for the northern Pacific later this year and commercial service no earlier than 2027. The name Panthalassa comes from the Greek for "all-sea" — the superocean that surrounded Pangaea 250 million years ago. Read the engineering case against it →
Become a member → Bring this to Tuesday's workshop
Series B$140M
Total raised$210M
Ocean-3 pilot2026
Commercial target2027
Watch●Melbourne AI Hub on YouTube●New uploads weekly
Watch the workshops — uploaded every Sunday.
We film the Tuesday sessions and put them up the same week — workshop walkthroughs, member builds, the occasional retraction. Subscribe to @MelbourneAIHub if you want the long-form companion to the Dispatch. No subscriber-only fluff; every video stays free.
Open the channel → RSVP the next workshop
Workshops on tape—
Subscribers—
Avg watch time—
Uploads / month4
Tuesdays @ 6 PM●317 / 480 Collins●Pay-what-you-can
The open workshop, every Tuesday.
Three hours, no slides-only deck. We bring the latest model releases, a build to ship, and the operators who run the Hub. Members go free; everyone else picks an amount that feels right. Filmed for the YouTube channel, written up in the Sunday Dispatch.
RSVP this Tuesday → See the open ledger
Sessions this quarter13
Seats per session24
Avg new build per session1
Cost to attend$0+
The Stack●What members actually use●Open to swap
Every frontier model, plus the open weights.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Ollama, Cursor, Antigravity, Base44. The Hub runs a deliberately broad stack so members can pick the right tool per build — not get locked into one lab's roadmap. Workshop attendees get the full set hands-on; we publish what works and what doesn't.
Read the Stack Guide → See what we built with it
Models in active use8
Labs covered5
Editors / IDEs supported3
Avg switching cost$0
01 / 06
What AI built●Running in production

Nine real builds, all shipped with AI co-piloting.

The Hub doesn't just demo AI — we ship it. Filter by category, scroll for more. Each card opens the live site.

Partner-friendly. If you're a frontier-model lab and want a quiet space in Melbourne to see what builders do with your tools, hello@melbourneaihub.com.au.

This week in the field●24 May 2026●Curated

Open weights, new tools, a few honest retractions.

What the editors are actually reading. Each card links straight to the primary source — no third-party hot takes.

huggingface.co · 20 May

Carbon — genomic LLMs at 500M, 3B, and 8B.

Hugging Face Biology Research drops the model family, four datasets, and an interactive demo for DNA generation and variant-effect prediction. Open weights.
Open weights · BiologyRead →
anthropic.com · Recent

Claude 4.x family — Opus, Sonnet, Haiku.

Anthropic's current frontier line. Opus 4.7 is the long-context flagship; Sonnet 4.6 the workhorse; Haiku 4.5 the fast one. We use all three in the member portal.
Foundation modelRead →
openai.com · Recent

What's shipping on the OpenAI side.

GPT-class releases, Operator agent updates, and the o-series reasoning models. The Hub uses the API for member-side image and code generation.
Foundation modelRead →
deepmind.google · Recent

Gemini's multimodal trajectory.

DeepMind keeps pushing image and video understanding plus native tool-use. We're testing whether the latest tier can read a schematic and call out the wiring fault.
MultimodalRead →
github.blog · Recent

Copilot agent mode in the wild.

Background agents that file PRs, ask for review, and ship without taking over the editor. Useful for the long tail of "small fixes you keep meaning to make".
Developer toolsRead →
x.ai · Recent

Grok and live-data search.

xAI's open-weight family leans on real-time search. Worth a look when your build needs market or news signal as live context.
Open weightsRead →

Curated by the editors until the auto-fetch from official RSS feeds ships. Spot something we should run? hello@melbourneaihub.com.au.

The books●Open●Updated weekly

Founder-funded until demand proves itself.

No outside capital, no opaque budgets. The Hub is paid for by the people who run it; every dollar in and out is logged in public. Workshop tickets and member dues cover what they can; the rest comes from the founders.

Income this month
$0
tickets, dues, and workshop revenue.
Spend this month
$0
tools, hosting, space, AI compute.
Runway
∞
founder-backed until demand justifies otherwise.
Retractions YTD
0
corrections we owed. None this period.

The full ledger — milestones, decisions, vendor list, AI compute spend — lives on the Transparency page.

Powered by●The platforms shaping AI

Our stack, in the open.

The Hub runs on a deliberately broad mix — frontier models from every major lab, plus the open-weight ecosystem. Members get the full set in workshops; we test what works, publish what doesn't.

Anthropic Claude Claude Long-context reasoning. Default for code, ops, and our chat.
OpenAI ChatGPT Conversational AI, plugins, broad general knowledge.
Google Gemini Gemini Multimodal understanding, Google ecosystem integration.
xAI Grok Grok Real-time data, creative voice, long context.
Ollama Ollama Run open-source models locally on your own hardware.
Google Antigravity Antigravity Google's agentic coding IDE for autonomous development.
Base44 Base44 No-code AI app builder for rapid prototyping.
Cursor Cursor AI-native code editor used by every Hub member shipping software.
Find us●Melbourne CBD

317 / 480 Collins Street.

480 Collins St
Suite 317, Melbourne 3000
Fri & Sat
Open workshop · 6 – 9 PM
Members
Anytime, 24/7 access
Nearest stop
Southern Cross · 4 min walk
Directions → Next workshop →
The weekly Dispatch●Friday 4 PM AEST

Read what we built — and what we retracted.

One issue a week. Long-form, signed by the editors, and free. Unsubscribe in one click.