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.
Funny, we have similar views about Google search[1], and those days were much better
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940485
[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4...
> This is part of an overhaul dubbed Turing 2.0 under which the institute will focus on three key areas: health, the environment, and defence and security.
They're trying to make the organization into a defense subcontractor (with a few side-projects for image maintenance), and purging anyone who isn't interested in that mission.
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.
A lot of academic researchers who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere ended up there.
The org is fundamentally dysfunctional according to an insider I spoke to. They blamed leadership.
They should have isolated it from academia - no hires from universities allowed, only hiring people who had previously worked in industry for the last few years.
Now this may be difficult in the UK because all jobs pay two quid a year, you have to live in a closet somewhere with a name like Pennyfarthing-upon-Longbottoms, and you can't get air conditioning without permission from the king.
If you change the sex and it becomes a sexist statement, it was always a sexist statement.
'our [UK?] international leadership in AI' -> citation needed?
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.
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:
Why did they have projects in those areas at all?
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…
These are not serious people interested in cutting edge AI research.
What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute? (April 2024): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43493313
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.
This is part of the "identity crisis"?
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.
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.
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...
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.
Looks like activists pushing DEI have infiltrated this organisation, like many others in the UK.
