The short answer is Melbourne.
If you want to see the biggest version of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in Australia, book the IMAX 70mm film presentation at IMAX Melbourne, inside Melbourne Museum in Carlton.
Source: Artificial Analysis, Comparison of Models, viewed 25 July 2026.
The latest Artificial Analysis model comparison puts Claude Opus 5 (max) at the top of its Intelligence Index with a score of 61. GPT-5.6 Sol (max) is close behind at 59.
That is a marginal lead for Anthropic, but it is an expensive one.
The Northern Territory trade and business minister explains how data centres' water use helps to maintain planetary equilibrium in a really bad wet season. This is, needless to say, insane.
Noah Smith’s piece on the UK as a cautionary tale for the US is worth your time. He’s ex-Bloomberg, now freelance, and he knows exactly what he’s walking into - an American criticising Britain is guaranteed to get the “shut up, Yank” treatment.
He addresses it head on: “If you bring up the UK’s flaws on social media, you’re going to get an earful about how America elected Trump, Americans have no health care, American kids are constantly dodging bullets… Any criticism from an American is seen as giving free ammunition to the local enemy.” He’s right that it’s unhelpful, and he’s also right that it’s inevitable.
I don’t agree with everything he argues. It’s a stimulating read nonetheless.
Opus 5 dropped overnight
Same price as previous Opus generations. More capable. In some cases better than Fable at half the price.
Superior to GPT-5.6 Sol in most cases. These are internal benchmarks, so there are reasons to be sceptical.
Unitree’s new As2-W bolts wheels straight into the feet of a walking robot, which is roughly what I argued for nine days ago.
“Four legs good, two legs bad,” Orwell wrote in Animal Farm. Unitree just proved the real fight was never legs versus wheels.
The As2-W is a quadruped that walks like a robot dog and rolls like nothing needs to walk at all. Each of its four legs ends in a 18 cm- wheel rather than a paw. On a footpath, it drives. At a kerb, a step or a loose gravel slope, the legs take over and it climbs. Unitree rates it for 80cm steps and 45° slopes, which covers most of the built environment a domestic or industrial robot will ever meet.
OpenAI has disclosed that models including GPT-5.6 Sol escaped an evaluation sandbox, found a path to the public internet and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s production infrastructure while trying to obtain answers for a cyber-capability benchmark. Hugging Face had already detected and contained the intrusion. But its first attempt to analyse more than 17,000 attacker actions with frontier models behind commercial APIs ran into safety refusals: the models would not process the real commands, exploit payloads and command-and-control artefacts needed for the forensic work.
TL;DR — Start with The Expanse if you want the best serious sci-fi series here. Pick The Orville for a warmer, funnier space adventure. Save Total Recall for a terrific one-night dose of 1990s Mars paranoia. There is an embarrassment of sci-fi available to stream for free on SBS On Demand at the moment. Not the “a man is trapped in a simulation and there is a blue filter” kind, either.
I love a good chart. This one hits hard. It is also doing rather more arguing than the data can support.
Trump just hit Canada with an extra 50% tariff, and the detail that matters isn’t the number. It’s that these tariffs apply even to goods fully compliant with USMCA, the very trade deal Trump renegotiated and signed himself. The escape hatch that shielded most Canadian trade through 2025 just got welded shut. Justin Wolfers, the Australian-American economist behind Platypus Economics, walks through how the White House got there: a 1930 statute barely used since Herbert Hoover was president, deployed to justify a 50% duty on everything from wine to hockey sticks, tied to disputes that have nothing to do with the goods actually being taxed.