Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

[nmeofthestate]

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.

[trentnix]

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.

[derefr]

I don't think you need to read between the lines. The lede is buried, but explicit:

> 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.

[ok123456]

Yes, we're pretty accustomed to these non-specific accusations of "toxicisity" at this point. It's code for "my pet projects and initiatives have been cut because they produce little of value."

[netbioserror]

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.

[rhubarbtree]

AKA academics.

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.

[Angostura]

I’m sure exactly those words were said about Turin

[coolhand2120]

> 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.

[logifail]

> “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]

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.

[Animats]

"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]

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]

>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.

[alephnerd]

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

[goobert]

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

[bell-cot]

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]

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!

[gedy]

> "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"?

[FerretFred]

Gods forbid that these four men might have been best qualified for the job, or are we reducing suitability to box-ticking again?

[Temporary_31337]

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-und...

[homefree]

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.

[nemomarx]

What international leadership in AI does the UK have? any models produced?

[sobiolite]

DeepMind was founded and is still headquartered in London.

[rhubarbtree]

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.

[cbeach]

> 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.

[theossuary]

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.

[incone123]

Given Alan Turing's work in the defense field, I do not think it grotesque to put his name on defence work.

[aurumque]

Let's not forget just how much of Alan Turing's work went towards "defense of the state" before they discarded him. Even with the royal pardon, my biggest gripe is that they continue to use his name and likeness for anything government affiliated.

[0ct4via]

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/yMt9Q