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Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

• nemomarx 1y ago
  What international leadership in AI does the UK have? any models produced?
  • sobiolite 1y ago
    DeepMind was founded and is still headquartered in London.
    • logifail 1y ago
      "DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014 and merged with Google AI's Google Brain division to become Google DeepMind in April 2023" Q: Is the HQ nominally being in London at all relevant given it was acquired by Alphabet/Google? I'm sure the accountants have the tax status all sorted by now...
      • eab- 1y ago
        a lot of the researchers are still in london
        • logifail 1y ago
          I understand that iPhones are assembled in China, India and Vietnam. Would those countries issue press releases on "their leadership in iPhones"?
          • vouwfietsman 1y ago
            China, India and Vietnam absolutely lead in manufacturing iphones, yes.
            • logifail 1y ago
              in manufacturing <-- did you notice this bit? :) I was responding to the quote from Dame Wendy Hall claiming that that UK [has] "international leadership in AI"
          • cma 1y ago
            But in this case Deepmind's assembly (plugging in datacenter cables, etc.) is largely done in the US.
          • LeifCarrotson 1y ago
            I'm sure representatives of those countries love to say so, especially when talking to third parties about their expertise in manufacturing: "Yes, here in Zhengzhou, CN we're leaders in electronics manufacturing - the iPhone is assembled here at Foxconn!" However, Apple (headquartered in the US) loves to issue press releases describing how their products are "Designed by Apple in California[, USA]" even though a lot of work in the manufacturing, the software, and the design of subcomponents (or major components, I don't know how Apple is organized internally) are done in China, India and Vietnam as you listed. I'd argue that in the same way that Shenzen and Zhengzhou are leaders in electronics assembly because the bulk of the iPhone and other products are built there, regardless of the location of the headquarters of Apple, so to can London claim to be a leader in AI because the researchers for DeepMind are located in London, regardless of who owns the DeepMind brand. Buying a thing from another country doesn't make your location a leader in that thing.
            • logifail 1y ago
              > "we're leaders in electronics manufacturing" The UK wasn't claiming to be "leaders _in manufacturing_", they were claiming "international leadership in AI". As I said elsewhere in the thread, citation needed...
        • firefax 1y ago
          Also in general Google satellite offices often house the engineers of acquired startups who don't want to move to the mothership. It's not their primary purpose but it's one of the things they use them for.
          • logifail 1y ago
            > in general Google satellite offices often house the engineers of acquired startups who don't want to move to the mothership Would it be unfair to ask if (in this instance the UK's) satellite country taxpayers are subsidising corporate offices when the overall structures are arranged such that any overall corporation tax payable will be paid in the lowest-possible jurisdiction? See - for instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...
      • shkkmo 1y ago
        It's not just the HQ, the only AI researcher I know personally is an American who moved to London to work on AI with DeepMind well after the acquisition.
        • logifail 1y ago
          The registered HQ and a large research center are in London, but ownership, executive control, substantial staffing, a big fraction of the training/serving compute, and the commercialization pathway run through Alphabet's U.S. operations, so the work is, in practical and legal senses, U.S.-based... See also https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/deepmind/2019-deepmind-fullaccounts.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/deepmind/2019-d... "As part of a wider group reorganisation, the Company distributed intellectual property assets which had a nil book value to another group undertaking on 31 October 2019." Honestly, claiming DeepMind is still some scrappy London-based startup is quite unfortunate :/
          • homefree 1y ago
            +1 Europe (especially) and the UK largely don't matter - it's a battle between the US and China, the gap will only grow wider and faster than it already has (and it's already getting really noticeable). I attribute it mostly to a cultural problem and I don't think they can fix their politics from the downward spiral they're on. It's why they have a number that rounds to zero of billion dollar software companies and why all their ambitious people do their best to get to the US.
          • klelatti 1y ago
            > The registered HQ and a large research center are in London ... > so the work is, in practical and legal senses, U.S.-based... These two statements literally contradict each other in both cases.
            • logifail 1y ago
              > These two statements literally contradict each other in both cases Welcome to how multinational corporate entities structure their tax affairs! You might like to start by reading https://taxjustice.net/2024/11/06/corporate-tax-haven-index-indicator-deep-dive-royalties-and-services/ https://taxjustice.net/2024/11/06/corporate-tax-haven-index-... although there are many others....
  • rhubarbtree 1y ago
    3000 AI companies in the UK. DeepMind obviously, but also top ranking universities working on AI like Edinburgh and Oxbridge. The US is five times larger than the UK, so no it’s not likely to be comparable. But the UK is up there.
• gedy 1y ago
  > "In March last year more than 180 staff wrote a letter to leadership expressing “serious concerns” about the organisation’s approach to diversity after it appointed four men to senior roles" This is part of the "identity crisis"?
  • logifail 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • ryandv 1y ago
      Monty Python seems especially appropriate here. > It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression! [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp9MPLEAqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp9MPLEAqA
      • taneq 1y ago
        Alright, you can have the right to have babies.
    • theossuary 1y ago
      I mean go ahead and pretend you're black or whatever, I'm sure that'll go over well with the people you work with every day. There are some real weirdos on this site
  • eltondegeneres 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • dmix 1y ago
      Turing was a pioneer in technology. The organization's mandate and reason for it's funding is as a "national institute for data science and artificial intelligence". Putting Turing's name on it doesn't mean the organization must serve primarily as a performant or symbolic role to his sexuality. And regardless it sounds like the gender ratio is in line with STEM averages (or even above average). > At ATI, management at the scientific leadership level referred to in the letter – people who oversee research into AI – has six women to 13 men, a split of approximately 32%-68%. The gender split among ATI’s total staff of 560 people is 53% male and 47% female.
• Temporary_31337 1y ago
  When it was founded in 2014 it was criticized as yet another glass building in London (technically a floor in this case) in a very prestigious location. And indeed as you could a lot of the funding went into the building, maintenance, events/catering and you could see random freeloaders loosely associated with the Institute using the space as a free coworking space. I think since the beginning, the PhD funding was great idea as you could do your research towards current issues, somewhat outside of the usual rusty academic echo chambers. But the fact that you were supposed to commute to the central London location, a lot of the grant went on train tickets or accommodation. As an early LLM adopter / practitioner, I went there for some sessions on AI Ethics and such and did not see that it was worth the millions pumped into the institution as we saw that whatever Captain Obvious insights (guardrails, data protection etc) came out of the Institute were completely ignored by the US giants. The current political twist toward practical applications in defence might actually be good for the institute as they will actually be able to practice some applied science but frankly I don't have much hope that my tax payer money is being put to good use here - it's always been a desperate scream for relevance and there's more and more of this action free nonsense coming from the government, like the recent OpenAI memorandum https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/memorandum-of-understanding-between-the-uk-and-openai-on-ai-opportunities https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/memorandum-of-und...
  • homefree 1y ago
    This is sort of the problem with nonprofits and NGOs generally - they have bad incentives, are easily corrupted, and attract people that don't create any value. It's the communist form of a company and shares similar failures. IMO we're better off just not having them for the most part.
    • troad 1y ago
      The purpose of most non-profits would not make any sense as a company, and is not easily amenable to being measured in terms of 'value'. What value is feeding poor people? Technically negative, as that food could have been sold for a profit. But that is of course not a useful metric here. I agree that it is difficult to align incentives for non-profits, but turning them into companies would simply add a profit motive and an obligation to shareholders on top of those difficult-to-align incentives. The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc) are generally powerless vis-à-vis those non-profits, and there is a perpetual risk of corruption arising from that effective lack of accountability. The paying customers of a business are relatively much more powerful vis-à-vis that business. If Gmail upsets you, you switch to Fastmail; if your soup kitchen upsets you, you... what? Don't eat? This stuff is very, very hard, and something I'm sceptical will ever be solved, least of all here on HN.
• logifail 1y ago
  > “The ATI brand is well recognised internationally,” says Dame Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton and the co-chair of a 2017 government AI review. “If it ceases to be the national institute for AI and data science then we are at risk of weakening our international leadership in AI.” 'our [UK?] international leadership in AI' -> citation needed?
  • jlokier 1y ago
    DeepMind was founded in London, UK and still headquartered there, and is one of the leaders in the field.. Notable well-known things from DeepMind are AlphaGo (the first time a computer beat a world champion at Go), AlphaFold (resulting in a Nobel prize). Gemini (LLM, a variant of which is used in Google search results) and Gemma (open-weights LLMs). They were acquired by Google, so you could argue they aren't centred in the UK any more, but I still think they qualify as international leadership in AI coming from the UK.
    • logifail 1y ago
      > They were acquired by Google, so you could argue they aren't centred in the UK any more [..] They've been acquired. There's nothing left to argue. I was reading earlier today about how Kuka AG, the German mechanical engineering company, was sold to a Chinese investor in 2016. A fascinating story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUKA
• temptemptemp111 1y ago
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• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• nmeofthestate 1y ago
  Reading between the lines - actually, just reading the lines - it sounds like another organisation that got infested with the kind of people who are apt to ruin organisations, and perhaps an attempt it being made to fumigate it, and they don't like that.
  • netbioserror 1y ago
    There are plenty of anthropological, sociological, and philosophical arguments that this is inevitable for any organization. Once visionaries in any organization of any size are gone, the priorities of its members are proportionally dominated over time by simple self-preservation.
    • stego-tech 1y ago
      > Once visionaries in any organization of any size are gone, the priorities of its members are proportionally dominated over time by simple self-preservation. This. It’s also nigh impossible for new visionaries to succeed in an organization because of that self-preservation of the existing ruling political class. Visionaries show loyalty to the org, not the people, and that makes them a prime target for harassment and cuts as a result. Smart orgs keep visionaries in charge, but accountable.
      • trentnix 1y ago
        And when they can't suppress visionaries within the organization, the ruling class finds other ways to preserve their power. Today the entrenched companies, organizations, and government bureaucracies collaborate to write the laws and regulations and pursue predatory competitive strategies that suppress new competitors and preserve their power. There are always good reasons for why X law or Y regulation exists or why Z company is given preferences and even subsidies. But the visionaries are undermined all the same.
  • trentnix 1y ago
    Without knowing any details, I'm guessing what's happened is the inevitable result that befalls organizations as predicted by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
• theossuary 1y ago
  Maybe they should just start again. Taking the name of a man who the state chemically castrated and drove to suicide and putting it on an institution being repurposed from public good to defense of the state seems grotesque to me.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • incone123 1y ago
    Given Alan Turing's work in the defense field, I do not think it grotesque to put his name on defence work.
    • theossuary 1y ago
      If he had done that work after they castrated him and drove him to suicide, sure, but that wasn't the order of events.
      • incone123 1y ago
        Had he not bothered with the work and the axis powers had been victorious, we would be executing homosexuals today. Modern threats from Russia and Iran hardly bode any better. Your reasoning that putting his name on an institution that does as much liberal arts as it does science is ok but not if it does defence work, is hard to fathom.
        • theossuary 1y ago
          I don't know who you're arguing with. I simply stated that Turing met the call to protect his country, and they turned around and chemically mutilated him and drove him to suicide. The UK is doing the same thing to queer people today; all the while pretending like they're enlightened because they slapped their victims names on their institutions.
        • Yeul 1y ago
          Considering the Christ fascism of the US we should not pat ourselves on the back
• goobert 1y ago
  Instead of founding this institute and spending however much they did on it they should have just protected DeepMind and not allowed it to have been sold to Google
• alephnerd 1y ago
  An earlier discussion on HN about this issue. What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute? (April 2024): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43493313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43493313
• 0ct4via 1y ago
  Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/yMt9Q https://archive.is/yMt9Q
• bell-cot 1y ago
  Lots of talk about Alan Turing's "legacy" being at stake, "cornerstones", and such - when the story admits that the Institute is only 11 years old. And that the gov't cut & pasted Turing's name onto the front door, 60 years after his death. And trying to read the article - the narcissistic Dilbert-speak never stops. Theory: The ATI was founded purely as an exercise in pretentious political posturing. And even on Day 1, it was so badly infested with self-serving third-raters that there never was any chance of it succeeding.
  • tonyarkles 1y ago
    And uhhh... while us computer science types know him for vast contributions to our field... the biggest contribution that the UK Government likely cared about at the time was a massive contribution to (inter)national security and defence!
    • coolhand2120 1y ago
      Right? I had a picture of Turing on my wall long before this institute existed and it will hang there long after no matter what these fools do.
• cbeach 1y ago
  > In March last year more than 180 staff wrote a letter to leadership expressing “serious concerns” about the organisation’s approach to diversity after it appointed four men to senior roles. Looks like activists pushing DEI have infiltrated this organisation, like many others in the UK.
• coolhand2120 1y ago
  > In March last year more than 180 staff wrote a letter to leadership expressing “serious concerns” about the organisation’s approach to diversity after it appointed four men to senior roles. If you change the sex and it becomes a sexist statement, it was always a sexist statement.
• Animats 1y ago
  "ATI has recently notified about 50 staff – or approximately 10% of its workforce – that they are at risk of redundancy and is shutting down projects related to online safety, tackling the housing crisis and reducing health inequality." Why did they have projects in those areas at all?
  • LatteLazy 1y ago
    The UK has a bunch of serious issues. But actually fixing them would require hard decisions. So our government wants to look like it is frantically working to achieve these things (fix our housing crisis etc). But absolutely not making the changes needed. So they announce things like the Turing institute to look busy. Then dump weird requirements on it to look like they’re doing things. Then defund it (because it was never meant to be a real thing, just a donkey to pin press releases on). See also the “Spaceports” we built, our “massive breakthroughs” in fusion energy and SMRs, Heathrow extension etc…
• ungreased0675 1y ago
  >In March last year more than 180 staff wrote a letter to leadership expressing “serious concerns” about the organisation’s approach to diversity after it appointed four men to senior roles. These are not serious people interested in cutting edge AI research.