Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis • Hacker News Board

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#41

Post by logifail » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #33

logifail wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

It's not just the HQ, the only AI researcher I know personally is an American who moved to London to work on AI with DeepMind well after the acquisition.

The registered HQ and a large research center are in London, but ownership, executive control, substantial staffing, a big fraction of the training/serving compute, and the commercialization pathway run through Alphabet's U.S. operations, so the work is, in practical and legal senses, U.S.-based...

"As part of a wider group reorganisation, the Company distributed intellectual property assets which had a nil book value to another group undertaking on 31 October 2019."

Honestly, claiming DeepMind is still some scrappy London-based startup is quite unfortunate :/

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#42

Post by atq2119 » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

logifail wrote: post #37

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure representatives of those countries love to say so, especially when talking to third parties about their expertise in manufacturing: "Yes, here in Zhengzhou, CN we're leaders in electronics manufacturing - the iPhone is assembled here at Foxconn!" However, Apple (headquartered in the US) loves to issue press releases describing how their products are "Designed by Apple in California[, USA]" even though a lot…

> "we're leaders in electronics manufacturing" The UK wasn't claiming to be "leaders _in manufacturing_", they were claiming "international leadership in AI". As I said elsewhere in the thread, citation needed ...

What you're replying to is an analogy, that you seem to completely fail to understand.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#43

Post by derefr » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

nmeofthestate wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#44

Post by tonyarkles » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

bell-cot wrote: post #24

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…

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!

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#45

Post by cbeach » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

> 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.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#46

Post by Angostura » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:55 PM UTC

nmeofthestate wrote: post #11

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.

I’m sure exactly those words were said about Turin

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#47

Post by homefree » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #4

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 gr…

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.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#48

Post by theossuary » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

incone123 wrote: post #25

theossuary wrote: post #12

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.

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

If he had done that work after they castrated him and drove him to suicide, sure, but that wasn't the order of events.

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#49

Post by homefree » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 7:00 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #3

> "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"?

[flagged]

Re: Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis

#50

Post by jlokier » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 7:01 PM UTC

logifail wrote: post #6

> “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?

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.