What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute?
chalmermagne.com
chalmermagne.com
[1] https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-starmer-ai-...
You have a desire to be relevant in an important technological shift.
On one side, you have big tech companies laser-focused on attracting the best talent and putting them in a high-pressure cooker to deliver real business outcomes, under a leadership group that has consistently proven effective for the last XX years.
On the other side, you have universities, led by the remnants of that talent pool—those who were left behind in the acquisition race—full of principles and philosophical opinions but with little to no grounded experience in actual execution. Instead, you find a bunch of PhD students who either didn’t make the cut to be hired by the aforementioned tech companies or lack the DNA to thrive in them, actively avoiding that environment. Sprinkle on top several layers of governmental bureaucracy and diluted leadership, just to ensure everyone gets a fair slice of the extra funding.
I'm surprised anyone is surprised.
> For example, neither the key advance of transformers nor its application in LLMs were picked up by advisory mechanisms until ChatGPT was headline news. Even the most recent AI strategies of the Alan Turing Institute, University of Cambridge and UK government make little to no mention of AGI, LLMs or similar issues.
Almost any organisation struggles to stay on task unless there's a financial incentive or another driver, such as exceptional staff/management in place. Give them free money - the opposite of financial incentive - and the odds drop further.
Where I'm from, master's was the traditional undergraduate degree. Bachelor's degrees were introduced later, but the society was reluctant to accept them. For a long time, the industry considered people with a bachelor's degree little more than glorified dropouts.
Our PhDs also used to take really long, being closer to a habilitation in some European countries than what is currently typical for a PhD. But starting in the 90s, there was a lot of pressure towards shorter American-style PhDs.
These days, the nominal duration of studies is 3 years for a bachelor's, 2 years for a master's, and 4 years for a PhD, but people usually spend at least a couple of years more. Which is pretty comparable to how things are done in the US.
The other end of the spectrum is the British system, where you can do a 3-year PhD after a 3-year bachelor's. But they also have longer PhD programs and optional intermediate degrees.
What DO we rely on that has come out of MIT this century? I'm having a real hard time thinking of examples.
Take mRNA vaccines for instance - the initial research began in university environments in the 80s, and it continued to be researched in universities (including in Europe) through the 00s until Moderna and BioNTech were started in the late 00s. All the exploratory work that led to the covid vaccine being possible was driven through universities up to the point where it became corporate. If that research hadn't been done, there would have been nothing to start a company about.
It's the same in computing - The modern wave of LLMs was set off by Attention is All you Need, sure, but the building blocks all came from academia. NNs have been an academic topic since the 80s and 90s.
I suspect that in 2050, there will be plenty of stuff being built on the foundations of work conducted in academia in the 00s and 10s.
I wouldn't expect to see that many groundbreaking innovations being useful in day-to-day life coming out of contemporary university research. You have to wait several decades to see the fruits of the labour.
Yet, European leaders have not got the memo, and expect the same level of output.
I'm frequently and sadly reminded when I visit this website that lot of (smart) people can't seem imagine any form of success that doesn't include common social praise and monetary gain.
This is not my experience with academia. Rather, my experience was that a lot of very idealistic people tried to make their best out of the complicated situation set up by incompetent politicians.
Glad to hear that. I shared this with my former academic friends and every one of them groaned in agreement.
Henry Kissinger said that academic politics were worse than White House politics.
The problem really is that universities are treated as if they have the same mandate as industry. Government people shouldn't tell a professor what kind of research is interesting. They should let the best people do what they want to do.
I remember an acquaintance becoming a professor, promoted from senior reader, and he was going to be associated with the Alan Turing Institute. I congratulated him, and asked him what he was going to do now with his freedom. He answered that there were certain expectations of what he would be doing attached to his promotion, so that would be his focus.
This way you don't get professors, you turn good people into bureaucrats.
Mind you, it was evident to me even twenty years ago when briefly considering a PhD that CS research not focused on applying itself to users would .. not be applied and languish uselessly in a paper that nobody reads.
I don't have a good answer to this.
(also, there is no way universities are going to come up with something which requires LLM like levels of capital investment: you need $100M of GPUs? You're going to spend a decade getting that funding. $10bn? Forget it. OpenAI cost only about half of what the UK is spending on its nuclear weapons programme!)
There's loads of worthwhile research to do that has nothing to do with LLMs. A lot of it will not or cannot be done in an industrial environment because the time horizon is too long and uncertain. Stands to reason that people who thrive in a "high-pressure cooker" environment are not going to thrive when given a long-term, open-ended goal to pursue in relative solitude that requies "principles and philosophical opinions" that aren't grounded in "actual execution". That's what makes real (i.e. basic) research hard and different as opposed to applied research. Lots of people in industry claiming to be researchers or scientists who are anything but.
It’s the GM and intel school of business. Constantly choose what makes money now, and avoid advancements and infrastructure. Wait now the competition is 20 years ahead? So you have 20 years worth of infrastructure to pay off, right now? Oh…
Everyone is just faking it until the chicken inevitably comes homes to roost. Then they walk about from the explosion and go to another company and say “see? Look how much share holder value I made! Nevermind that the company got destroyed shortly after I left!”
I do believe that these people at universities do have experience in the actual execution - of doing research. What they obviously have less experience in is building companies.
> Instead, you find a bunch of PhD students who either didn’t make the cut to be hired by the aforementioned tech companies
Or because they live in a country where big tech is not a thing. Or because these people simply love doing research (I am rather not willing to call what these AI companies are doing "research").
Many of the best Engineering and Computer Science departments, around the world, operate a revolving door for people to go in and out of industry and academia and foster the strongest of relationships bridging both worlds.
Look at Roger Needham’s Wikipedia page and follow his academic family tree up and down and you’ll see what I mean.
Ouch. Almost certainly nothing like the insult his memory endured from "The imitation game" film though. Everyone associated with that film should feel a bit ashamed.[1]
I'm a UK based software engineer, but I almost never heard anything about this organization. Has anything useful come out of it?
[1] I could only bear to watch the first 20 minutes. But I can't imagine it got any better.
"GCHQ Departmental Historian Tony Comer went even further in his criticism of the film's inaccuracies, saying that "The Imitation Game [only] gets two things absolutely right. There was a Second World War and Turing's first name was Alan".
If you are making a fictional film, knock yourself out. But when you are using a real person's name, have some respect for them and their work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
> Turing and Cairncross worked in different areas of Bletchley Park and there is no evidence they ever met. Alex Von Tunzelmann was angered by this subplot (which suggests that Turing was for a while blackmailed into not revealing Cairncross as a spy lest his homosexuality be revealed), writing that "creative licence is one thing, but slandering a great man's reputation – while buying into the nasty 1950s prejudice that gay men automatically constituted a security risk – is quite another."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Personaliti...
I'm sorry you didn't get the biography you wanted.
At least in places like Rutherford Appleton you have a distinct institutional identity and culture, in a place where it feels like stuff is going on (Harwell campus is a pretty cool place for both private and public research). There's an organisation that people work for with distinct aims and objectives. I don't really see how the ATI is much more than a funding brand under EPSRC.
If you set up a research institute, you can do good research in specific focus areas and take credit for it. If you just have a funding body, you're going to feel like a funding body, and very little is going to be attributable to your new institute.
I think the UK could do with setting up a few more proper national labs like the US has with LLNL, Oak Ridge and friends. That's not to say we don't have any, but if we're going to set up an institute, that's the model we should follow.
They'd rather make capital investments (which aren't a recurring budget line, so the same money can make different headlines next year) than pay for the sort of ongoing spend on paying experts competitive salaries to actually build a real capacity.
Prior to Turing Institute there was the Hartree Centre, which was hobbled from hiring anyone significant by being tied to a non-technical civil-service payspine that struggled to approach even "competent" level salaries for these positions as the posts didn't manage 100s of minions.
Government funded
Loosely defined goals
Little oversight
No accountability
Yup, given the inputs, your description checks out.
1) My understanding is that most the "researchers" and even students at ATI have a main role at a home institution. Really the question should be something more like "did ATI funding help advance UK research generally?" not "was ATI able to claim its own successes?"
2) Nobody has really mentioned how PhDs are a little different in the UK. E.g. you propose a topic -> research for three years -> receive PhD. In the US its more like research for 2+ years -> find a promising area -> do groundbreaking work over 1+ years -> receive PhD. In other words, its significantly easier to change your research direction in the US, of course its easier to miss out on things like the LLM explosion.
This is a reasonable objection, but imho misses the point.
Any entity that's unable to account for its positive externalities will underestimate its value. This happened to the Turing. Universities did not want to lose their staff to secondments or buyouts, and Turing cancelled major independent programs like their PhD offerings. Leads fought for their universities, as the article notes---not necessarily to make Turing itself better!
While recent cuts/"realignments" are painful, they also have re-focused support for projects at scale---projects that are substantially more than an afternoon a week for two academics. It's still, in many cases, subsidized consulting for UK businesses w/ dubious scientific merit, but that's a broader issue with the UK's research culture.
... or of a hype bubble. :-)
I'm pretty sure Rosenblatt was criticized back then for his non-tangible stupid ideas, and why the hell was his research was funded to begin with.
It probably doesn't help that software engineer salaries (and I guess researchers) there are a shame and does probably not attract talents.
For years I have add headhunters from UK contacting me living in Europe for positions there needing a relocation. And I had pity for them advertising for jobs that looks nice on paper but with salaries for senior developers equivalent to entry level positions here...
- The phone in your pocket? ARM chip. Was a British company.
- Google Deepmind? British too, but they weren't the Google Research/Google Brain people that made "Attention Is All You Need" paper that gave us today's LLMs. Still sucks though.
Most successful British teams I know are located in Miami, or funded from Palo Alto.
The article is about the second try, commencing 2014.
> the $5-6M cost of training is misleading. It comes from the claim that 2048 H800 cards were used for one training, which at market prices is upwards of $5-6M. Developing such a model, however, requires running this training, or some variation of it, many times, and also many other experiments (item 3 below). That makes the cost to be many times above that, not to mention data collection and other things, a process which can be very expensive (why? item 4 below). Also, 2048 H800 cost between $50-100M. The company that deals with DC is owned by a large Chinese investment fund, where there are many times more GPUs than 2048 H800.
https://therecursive.com/martin-vechev-of-insait-deepseek-6m...
Of course their anti-deep learning "most senior scientist" hasn't heard of DeepSeek, lol.