Stake Founder Creates His Own ChatGPT in Australia

Stake crypto casino founder Ed Craven has funded Melbourne-based AI startup MainCode to develop Australia’s first Large Language Model (LLM).

OpenAI and Anthropic are based in the US, whereas DeepSeek is based in China. In Melbourne, Australia, systems developer Dave Lemphers and millionaire Ed Craven, the creator of Stake, one of the world’s best online casino games, slots, and live casino games operators, are currently constructing the nation’s own version of a Large Language Model (LLM).

Lemphers, the former CTO of EasyGo, the parent company of Stake and Kick, is back in Melbourne after 10 years in the US developing AI businesses. He’s determined to work with Stake’s creator, Craven, to create a sovereign LLM.

“We’re targeting the end of this year to release our first fully trained-from-scratch, sovereign Large Language Model built entirely in Australia on infrastructure we operate and control,” Lemphers told Forbes Australia: “This will mark the first time an Australian team has trained a frontier-scale LLM end-to-end onshore.”

The startup is building its own infrastructure in Australia, including GPUs, storage, and training pipelines, rather than renting systems from others. The team includes a PhD from the University of Melbourne and former Google and Allen Institute for AI researchers.

Investment Worth Several Million Dollars

It takes substantial financial resources to assemble talent and create a very costly LLM from the ground up. In the short and long term, it’s an investment of several million dollars,“but it’s also an investment in brain gain.”

According to Lemphers, the name MainCode is a nod to the significance of Australia’s development of sovereign AI. He said they termed it like this because the core of each program serves as its primary function. It’s where control resides and where everything begins. They view sovereign AI in this way: “If you don’t own the main code, you don’t own the system. In a world where most companies are wrapping someone else’s API or fine-tuning foreign models, we believe Australia needs to own the main code of its AI future.”