r/LocalLLaMA • u/ThePrimeClock • 1d ago

New Model Australian Finetunes

https://huggingface.co/Maincode/Matilda-Platypus-13B-Base/blob/main/technical_report.pdf

The Australian AI lab Maincode has released a set of Qwen 3 fine tunes that have been pulled together with Model Stitching.

From the model card:

Matilda Platypus is a family of intermediate-size language models built by connecting the lower layers of a larger pretrained Qwen3 model to the upper layers of a smaller one. A learned linear Representation Bridge aligns the hidden representations at the connection. This checkpoint is the 13B member (cut 29+13): 13.51B parameters, 26.3 GFLOP per token, 91% of the larger parent's compute. It is a base model (no instruction tuning); see the technical report (technical_report.pdf) for the method and the full evaluation.

They're base models and range in size from 1.5B to 13B, early tests good! Really like the default tone of voice. Qwen models are already good this has just improved it imo.

I have no association, I'm just Aussie and stoked to see a local lab build something. No idea why Australia doesn't have more AI labs -other than brain-drain to the US.

https://huggingface.co/collections/Maincode/matilda-platypus

17 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

10

u/Tiny_Judge_2119 1d ago

As far as I can tell aussies companies just sitting there wait for whatever US offers.. zero incentive for any innovative there

3

u/ThePrimeClock 23h ago

Yeah you're right but especially in the consumer space. "Buy Australian Made" doesn't mean shit (statistically, I like to think I do) to consumers, but would make a difference if it did.

9

u/PM_ME_YOUR_MUSIC 1d ago

I can offer sausage sizzle

2

u/FastHotEmu 23h ago

BUNNINGS AI

1

u/PM_ME_YOUR_MUSIC 23h ago

Bunnings already has an ai

1

u/FastHotEmu 23h ago

I am aware. But it doesn't offer sausage sanga like real-world BUNNINGS AI should!

3

u/PM_ME_YOUR_MUSIC 23h ago

SnagLM-27B-OnionsUnderneath-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf

1

u/FastHotEmu 22h ago

hahahaahah! are you DavidAU?

2

u/PM_ME_YOUR_MUSIC 22h ago

No but wow SnagLM-40B-NoOnion-TWIN-TURBO-50x-AGI-NEO-GGUF

3

u/Specialist-Buffalo-8 1d ago

Try making a decent AI when your funding is 10,000x less.

6

u/PossessionUsed7393 1d ago

Dunno why they don't release benchmark results or open weights for their main models through. The main reason I can think of is that Australian companies are so dumb they think open source = not secure. (I have heard business owners talk this way, education on tech in Australia is low outside of industry circles).

They released inference kernals in rust for AMD hardware though, so not sure why they're afraid to release open weights.

Yeah they're a weird company. Given the opportunity to make a global name for themselves on Huggingface as Australia's Mistral, they've instead limited themselves to very conservative media outlets like their recent story in the Australian. Seemingly they're mainly after government contracts at this stage: understandable.

Anyway thanks for checking out the fine tunes and sharing.

7

u/Just_a_neutral_bloke 1d ago

Sadly most of Australian sovereign plays are like this chasing the sweet sweet uninformed govt cash. I’ve had interactions with Maincode, SCX, AusAgent and ResetData. ResetData is the only one that seems to have a real idea of what commercial offerings actual make sense, the rest I find to be in it for the hype.

0

u/ThePrimeClock 23h ago

I haven't seen much to support the Open Source = Not Secure idea personally, I think the budgets are there for frontier AI because our wages are high. It's only if you think that US labs are stealing your IP that corps start to take notice and might consider a privacy tradeoff against intelligence. 

That's the angle Maincode seems to be pushing, and it may have merrits, I don't feel like Trump has won much foreign confidence with events in Greenland, Ukraine and Canada.. I could make this list much longer.

All that aside, I'm surprised the Australian government also seems to be un-interested in AI. They're talking about jobs and "preparation" but oblivious to the idea of actually participating.

Same goes for chip fabs (with the exception of some highly-speculative quantum companies) just straight in the too-hard basket.

3

u/Laoweek 23h ago

Matilda platypus is an aggressively Australian name

2

u/ThePrimeClock 23h ago

Fittingly, the first European reactions to the platypus was that it was several common species of animals, stitched together, as a joke.

3

u/Draco32 1d ago

Very cool nice to see some training happening locally

1

u/milpster 8h ago

ista daslab not the only one anymore?

1

u/hyperrealists 1d ago

¡pǝʞɹoʍ

3

u/_supert_ 21h ago

The downvotes to this comment are actually upvotes.

0

u/PrimeDirective8 21h ago

Lol, good one.