Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/18/shut-it-down-and-start-again-staff-disquiet-as-alan-turing-institute-faces-identity-crisis

by glutamate • 11 months ago

62 83 11 months ago

theguardian.com

nemomarx• 11 months ago

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

sobiolite• 11 months ago

DeepMind was founded and is still headquartered in London.

logifail9• 11 months 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...

rhubarbtree2• 11 months 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• 11 months 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"?

FerretFred• 11 months ago

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• 11 months 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-und...

homefree3• 11 months 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.

troad4• 11 months 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.

logifail9• 11 months 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• 11 months 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.

logifail9• 11 months 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

nmeofthestate• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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.

trentnix2• 11 months 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.

prox• 11 months ago

And as Douglas Adams stated in the problem with ruling axiom, is that under no circumstance should you allow someone who gets themselves in a position to rule, rule.

godelski• 11 months ago

Funny given there was a heated discussion yesterday on the FFMPEG Assembly post[0]. I've been seeing similar heated conversations turn up more regularly. Honestly, I think this is a result of this Iron Law. Arguments between developers devoted to the goals of "the organization" vs those dedicated to "the organization", albeit a bit more abstracted.

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...

hnuser847• 11 months ago

This law needs the addition of a third kind of person: one who is neither devoted to the goals of the organization nor the organization itself, but merely wishes to use the organization as a vehicle to push their own social and political beliefs (such as DEI).

phendrenad22• 11 months ago

This is great, I've been looking for a way to express this vague notion I had about organizations. I was thinking along the lines of "nonprofits tend to become generic donation-seeking, rent-seeking entities, keeping their original goals only nominally" but the quote above is a less harsh way to put it.

dgoodell• 11 months ago

As a NASA employee, I think this is extremely true. I would bet most of the second group doesn’t or even comprehend that they’re doing it.

derefr• 11 months ago

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.

azalemeth• 11 months ago

I have friends who work there. This is absolutely the answer -- together with the government joint beyond hope that it will be the case that AI solves the UK's economic woes (without ever really understanding what it is)

Angostura• 11 months ago

I’m sure exactly those words were said about Turin

musicale• 11 months ago

Though its authenticity may be discredited in the modern AI era, many computer scientists still venerate the shroud of Turing.

ok123456• 11 months ago

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."

rhubarbtree2• 11 months ago

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.

astrange3• 11 months ago

You can get a lot of valuable work out of "unmanageable" academics if you figure out how to manage them. That's most of the secret of early Google's success. If we knew anything about the NSA it'd probably be how they work too.

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.

theossuary3• 11 months 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.

incone1232• 11 months ago

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

theossuary3• 11 months 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.

aurumque• 11 months ago

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.

goobert• 11 months 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• 11 months 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

bell-cot• 11 months 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• 11 months 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!

coolhand21202• 11 months 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.

0ct4via• 11 months ago

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

cbeach• 11 months 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.

coolhand21202• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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• 11 months 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.

Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

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