TASMANIA’S WILDEST WINTER ADVENTURES REVEALED

Tasmania is encouraging Australians to stop hibernating this winter and embrace the cold, unveiling 20 of the island’s wildest Off Season adventures across the state.

The experiences range from kayaking across Dove Lake beneath the snow-covered peaks of Cradle Mountain and cruising through ancient rainforest waterways on the Gordon River to glow-worm cave encounters, alpine scenic flights, and floating sauna cruises.

Here are some of the standout experiences luring travellers south this winter:

• Cradle Mountain Canyons is offering adventurous travellers the rare opportunity to kayak across Dove Lake beneath the snow-covered peaks of Cradle Mountain.

The three-hour guided experience, limited to just eight people at a time, uses handcrafted King Billy pine kayaks and includes hot drinks and snacks on a secluded shoreline surrounded by misty alpine wilderness.

Tours only operate when winter weather conditions allow, adding to the unpredictability and atmosphere of the experience.

• Kuuma Nature Sauna, Australia’s first floating sauna boat, has launched a series of winter sauna cruises on the icy waters south of Hobart.

Guests alternate between the crackling warmth of a wood-fired sauna and freezing ocean plunges while drifting through the still waters of North West Bay. One experience runs entirely after dark beneath the stars, while another combines sunrise cruises with cold-water dips in secluded coastal bays.

• Mole Creek Caves is inviting travellers underground for an immersive glow worm encounter deep beneath Tasmania’s limestone landscapes.

Limited to just eight guests per tour, the after-dark experience allows visitors to help scientists count glow worms as part of a citizen science initiative before lying beneath thousands of shimmering blue bioluminescent lights inside the cave system.

• World Heritage Cruises has unveiled a range of dramatic winter Gordon River experiences designed to embrace Tasmania’s famously moody weather.

One cruise offers a “Rain Guarantee”, allowing guests to return for free if rain falls continuously throughout the journey, while another includes upgraded upper-deck seating overlooking mist-covered waterways and rainforest-lined riverbanks. Families can also take part in a themed “Tiger Hunt” cruise inspired by the Tasmanian tiger.

• King Island Walks is leaning into the island’s rugged winter conditions with multi-day expeditions tracing the coastline walked by survivors of the Netherby shipwreck in 1866.

Guests trek through remote beaches, dunes and weather-battered headlands before retreating to warm accommodation each evening. Another winter experience sees visitors wrapped in puffer jackets, sipping Tasmanian pinot noir as they watch little penguins emerge from the surf at dusk.

• Par Avion is offering travellers access to some of Tasmania’s most isolated wilderness through two-day journeys into Bathurst Harbour and Port Davey.

Reached only by light aircraft, the experience combines scenic flights, guided boat tours and remote eco-cabin accommodation in the heart of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, far removed from roads, mobile reception and modern distractions.

• Ben Lomond Alpine Resort is embracing the alpine atmosphere with fireside mulled wine, skiing and snowboarding experiences, plus a Christmas in July celebration held high above Tasmania’s north-east plateau.

Following recent snowmaking upgrades, the resort says it now offers Tasmania’s most reliable snow season, with visitors able to drive directly into the ski village throughout winter.

Tourism Tasmania said the Off Season campaign was designed to encourage travellers to embrace the colder months rather than avoid them.

More than 500 bookable winter offers and events are running across the state as part of the initiative, spanning wilderness adventures, whisky tastings, dark-sky cruises, wellness escapes, long-table feasts and snow holidays.

The Off Season runs across Tasmania until August 31.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.

TASMANIA’S WILDEST WINTER ADVENTURES REVEALED

From floating saunas and glow worm caves to snow kayaking beneath Cradle Mountain, Tasmania’s Off Season is turning winter into the ultimate outdoor escape.