[HN Gopher] What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute?
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What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute?
Author : alexicon
Score : 76 points
Date : 2025-03-27 13:18 UTC (9 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.chalmermagne.com)
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Tldr: government boondoggle with no accountability
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "Considering how the UK treated Alan Turing while he was alive,
| he deserved a better institute to honour his memory."
|
| 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.
| bobajeff wrote:
| What's wrong with The Imitation Game?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Just throwing stuff at the wall here - Wikipedia has a pretty
| long list of historical inaccuracies https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historical_...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Histor
| ical_...
|
| "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.
| oakesm9 wrote:
| The main complaint seem to be the minimisation of Turing's
| homosexuality and the focus instead on Joan Clarke. There's
| also a whole list of historical inaccuracies listed on
| Wikipedia[0], including changing the name of the Enigma
| breaking machine from "Victory" to "Christopher" and stating
| that Turning invented "The Computer".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game#Historic
| al_...
| SirFatty wrote:
| You seem to be in the minority with that opinion..
|
| https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_imitation_game
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I agree with the parent poster and a ton of people do. Anyone
| who actually knows the story of the breaking of Enigma and
| Turing in general would know that that film is terrible.
| n4r9 wrote:
| The film is alright, it's just not particularly accurate.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| I know a great deal about both, Turing being my scientific
| idol. I thought The Imitation Game was great, though not
| nearly enough postwar events and his trauma. I realize the
| title _The Imitation Game_ was meant to be a double
| meaning, about both Bletchley 's cryptographic attempts and
| Turing's attempts to feign heterosexuality, but the movie
| ultimately was about breaking encryption, not a study of
| homosexual life in a bigoted nation. I wouldn't personally
| call it a biopic. It's a sensationalized version of actual
| events because the real thing would've been boring. No one
| wants to watch me, by analogy, sit at a whiteboard beside a
| computer staring at symbols for eight straight hours.
|
| I'm sorry you didn't get the biography you wanted.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Wait, a ton of people? I stand corrected!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The majority of the people who watched the film probably knew
| very little about Turing or his work. And now they have a
| horribly skewed view.
| smallpipe wrote:
| Matt Clifford just wants to hoover up the Turing's funding for
| his buddies at Entrepreneur First. The same Matt Clifford whose
| interests weren't declared [1] when he wrote the UK's AI policy.
| Why clowns in the government let him is beyond my understanding.
|
| [1] https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-starmer-
| ai-...
| camjw wrote:
| How much funding from the Turing institute has gone to his
| buddies at EF?
| rimeice wrote:
| Your understanding is quite limited in that case. There are
| strikingly few people in the uk who can provide a shred of
| legitimacy to the governments AI plans. It's precisely because
| of his "interests" that he knows what he's talking about.
| geremiiah wrote:
| This is no different than what happened in Germany. Despite
| having tons of funding, tens if not hundreds of AI research
| institutes, an abundance of talent and enough cluster time to go
| around for everyone, they were also blindsided by LLMs and are
| still to this day completely out of the race. Here in Germany,
| they tended to bet on "AI for science", because it sounds
| "sciency" and that somehow appears more substantive, even though
| a lot of these "AI for science" or ML4Science projects are utter
| bullshit. They also invested substantially in Quantum Computing,
| again because it sounds "sciency".
| bee_rider wrote:
| Almost every organization (private or public) was blindsided by
| LLM, right? That's... just the nature of a big new idea.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Almost every organization (private or public) was
| blindsided by LLM, right? That's... just the nature of a big
| new idea.
|
| ... or of a hype bubble. :-)
| tananan wrote:
| Ime it's not just being blindsided but also simply preferring
| to do research in other areas.
| croemer wrote:
| TabPFN comes out of the German University of Freiburg:
| https://github.com/PriorLabs/TabPFN
| ATIThrowaway wrote:
| The Turing was my first major experience of the UK research
| community. It was immediately apparent to me that it was a bit of
| a snakepit---resources were denied or otherwise withheld between
| teams as a part of internal competition, service to the
| organisation was routinely forgotten or ignored, and changes in
| direction seemed to occur every quarter, if not every month. It
| could have been a very cool thing, and the community that was
| fostered there during the stable periods was extremely
| productive. But, there's now so much ill will around the latest
| purges that I doubt it'll ever regain that vibe.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > resources were denied or otherwise withheld between teams as
| a part of internal competition, service to the organisation was
| routinely forgotten or ignored, and changes in direction seemed
| to occur every quarter, if not every month.
|
| Government funded
|
| Loosely defined goals
|
| Little oversight
|
| No accountability
|
| Yup, given the inputs, your description checks out.
| ATIThrowaway wrote:
| In my experience, this happens at bad private-sector
| organisations as well. An asp is an asp, even when it's
| taxpayer-funded.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Private-sector organisations aren't wasting tax money.
| They're mis-spending their own money.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| They love to waste government funds too when they can get
| their hands on some.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's still the government mis-spending your taxes.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What about when governments give private sector
| organizations tax breaks, and then those organizations go
| on to do something wasteful?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's the government doing it. I don't understand the
| question. The government is deciding to do something.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Government contracts (ultimately tax money) are the
| primary way a lot of companies get their money, though.
| You don't sell fighter aircraft or massive rockets to the
| public. Even a lot of AI companies like Palantir
| primarily serve the government.
| snickmy wrote:
| This was inevitable and we'll see it playing out all over Europe.
|
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes, this is so telling:
|
| > 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.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a fair appraisal of university research
| at all. How much do we rely on day to day that came out of MIT
| alone? A lot of innovation does come from industry, but certain
| other innovation is impossible with a corporation breathing
| down your neck to increase next quarter's profits.
| harvey9 wrote:
| The person you replied to is talking about the UK and Europe.
| I suspect that funding for research works differently at MIT
| and in the US generally.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Europe also seems to hand out PhDs like candy compared to
| the US (you can earn one faster, and you're less prepared
| for research), and there's a lot more priority put on
| master's degrees, which are largely a joke in the US
| outside a few fields like social work and fine arts.
| _Wintermute wrote:
| I would argue a European PhD prepares you for research
| better than a US one. You're expected to hit the ground
| running with required prior research experience and you
| have no classes or teaching obligations which explains
| why they're typically 3-4 years long.
| jltsiren wrote:
| European academia is not as uniform as in the US.
|
| 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Your rhetorical begs the question -- I can't think of
| anything more recent than the MIT license.
|
| What DO we rely on that has come out of MIT this century? I'm
| having a real hard time thinking of examples.
| miningape wrote:
| Same, the best I could think of that they did since the 90s
| was MIT OpenCourseware
| KPGv2 wrote:
| https://news.mit.edu/2024/fifteen-lincoln-laboratory-
| technol... Here are a number of things we will rely on
| presently.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I think when talking about university research output it's
| pretty clear that the objective of university research is
| to produce output that is much earlier in the stack of
| productisation than something that comes out of a corporate
| entity. The vast majority of university research probably
| won't impact people on a day-to-day basis the way that
| running a product-led company will, but that's not to say
| it isn't valuable.
|
| 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.
| tene80i wrote:
| Jesus... are you this judgmental about everyone in society?
| Some people just value the university environment. It doesn't
| mean they're incompetent and had no other options. Not everyone
| values money above all else, nor does choosing to opt out of
| the private sector mean people are "remnants".
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| From my perspective it's almost exactly opposite. Almost all
| of the people I consider exceptionally talented are vying for
| positions in academia (I'm in mathematics), and the people
| who don't make it begrudgingly accept jobs at the software
| houses / research labs.
|
| 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.
| auggierose wrote:
| I don't think universities should become industry. I mean, that
| is exactly what we have industry for. If you want to be put in
| a pressure cooker under leadership focused on business
| outcomes, great, do industry.
|
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yes. The demand for increasing control, driven by the
| "taxpayer's money!" lot evident in this thread, strangles
| almost all state-funded research because it demands to know
| up front what the outcome will be. Which instantly forces
| everyone to pick only sure-bet research projects, while
| trying to sneak off to do actual blue-sky research in the
| background on "stolen" fractions of the funding. Like TBL
| inventing the WWW at CERN: that wasn't in his research brief,
| I'm sure it wasn't something that was funded in advance
| specifically for him to do.
|
| 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!)
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Another point re: grounded experience, good
| professors/researchers make a point to take sabbaticals to work
| in industry for that purpose.
| sfpotter wrote:
| Have met lots of professors who are glorified managers who do
| not actual research taking sabbaticals for a fat paycheck. I
| doubt very much they do any real work during these
| sabbaticals either. If I had to guess, I would bet that these
| sabbatical positions are frequently sinecures.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Could be the case for some, but in the cases I know of, it
| was nothing like that - they took it seriously and used it
| as I said.
| sfpotter wrote:
| The problem is the "desire to be relevant in an important
| technological shift".
|
| 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.
| daveguy wrote:
| "actual execution" in the business world seems to be more and
| more synonymous with recklessly and incompetently fucking
| things up. See also: doge.
| resize2996 wrote:
| they see, "actual execution", I see, "failed upwards in a
| ZIRP economy"
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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").
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I'm sorry to read this -- it just doesn't feel grounded in my
| own lived experience.
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Needham
| owlbite wrote:
| Having been involved in UK research labs before moving to
| industry, none of this surprises me. The government is more
| interested in short term headlines than long-term actually doing
| something.
|
| 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.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I think one of the core observations in this article is that the
| ATI is essentially just a funding programme for existing
| university research organisations.
|
| 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.
| smeeth wrote:
| I could be totally wrong (please correct me if so), but IMO there
| are two things happening that weren't totally discussed.
|
| 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.
| auggierose wrote:
| Yes, I remember somebody doing a PhD in the US on theorem
| proving for a few years, but his last year he focused on doing
| deep learning work, did his PhD thesis on it, and got hired by
| OpenAI.
| ATIThrowaway wrote:
| > 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?"
|
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| When was the last time measures pushed heavily by bureaucrats
| with heavy government spending produced anything good?
| KPGv2 wrote:
| daily life in Western Europe literally right now?
| happyopossum wrote:
| for subjective applications of the term 'good'
| 7952 wrote:
| Covid vaccines?
| rq1 wrote:
| The purpose of these institutions is to fund research, which is
| not necessarily profitable.
|
| 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.
| nailer wrote:
| I don't think Americans know the extent of missed opportunity.
|
| - 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| _mournfully_ I call app Britain...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9iM_zzzQk
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Ironic that the UK went so wrong on this, considering London-
| based DeepMind are arguably the leading AI research group in the
| world.
| lqstuart wrote:
| I have no comment on any of the general whining about the
| ineffectiveness about academia and the public sector, but what
| struck me about this article is how tiny the funding amounts are.
| They're talking about a PS40 million endowment like it's
| impressive? Maybe I'm just too American but it's baffling that
| Cambridge or UCL cares about a PS1 million grant.
| greenflag wrote:
| While this is an excellently written piece and really insightful
| into the state of higher education funding, what seems to be
| missing from the debate is concrete ideas of what should be done
| differently (either in 2014 or today). A lot of US innovation
| success comes from deep pockets of private venture capital, which
| is just missing in the UK. So if you're a politician/bureaucrat
| with a (let's face it) relatively small budget and much politics
| to deal with, the best strategy to take is not obvious (at least
| to me).
| anonymousDan wrote:
| It's well written but completely unjustified in its criticism
| of UK universities or their role given the resources required
| to train SOTA models. Are any US universities training SOTA
| models? No. Your point about the need for private venture
| capital is exactly correct. I think some kind of new funding
| stream needs to be identified for doing this. The US is forcing
| China to sell TikTok's US arm for national security reasons. We
| could try to do something similar in return for granting US Big
| Tech companies access to Europe - I guess the digital tax is a
| step in this direction. But it seems challenging to enforce
| that given the current power dynamics.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| What an utter bullshit take. As if the ATI could ever be
| competitive at LLMs given the resource requirements needed to
| train foundational models. If we want UK universities to continue
| to make contributions in this sphere we either need to massively
| reduce the cost of training SOTA LLMs, create some national
| shared GPU infrastructure, or resource universities to access
| cloud infra. Unfortunately the latter is just introducing further
| dependencies on overseas (and increasingly problematic) private
| clouds. If things continue as they are then having the capability
| to train SOTA models will be a strategic imperative for every
| nation.
| frozenseven wrote:
| What was the budget for DeepSeek's V3/R1 again?
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Who actually knows? Far beyond what a UK university can
| afford.
| frozenseven wrote:
| I see. Let's just assume that DeepSeek's V3/R1 budget of
| ~$5.5M was a lie and the Alan Turing Institute is just too
| poor to compete with their nine-figure sums. I guess I have
| no further questions.
| Animats wrote:
| So, a startup failed. Liquidate and try something else, as YC
| does.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| After skimming through the article and a few of the comments, you
| could say that institute wasn't turing complete! :D
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