Stake's creator launches its own ChatGPT – now from Australia

The founder of the Stake crypto casino and the Kick platform, billionaire Ed Craven decided to invest in artificial intelligence — but not like everyone else. Instead of investing in American projects, he is funding MainCode, a Melbourne-based startup that is developing Australia's first artificial intelligence language model (LLM) completely from scratch and on its own infrastructure.

The project is led by Dave Lemfers, former CTO of EasyGo, the parent company for Stake and Kick. He stepped down at the end of 2024 and is now focused on creating alternatives to OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek.

According to the team, the release of the first fully trained LLM is scheduled for the end of 2025. A PhD from the University of Melbourne, as well as former Google and Allen Institute for AI specialists, are involved in the development — in general, the composition is impressive. Instead of the usual approach of renting clouds or ready-made GPU farms, MainCode builds everything from data centers to training pipelines.

The goal is to create independent AI for Australian companies, government agencies and users who care about privacy, security and non-dependence on solutions from the US and China.