6 ms·

Question for people knowledgeable on the topic: are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top t

Question for people knowledgeable on the topic: are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? The article mentions CERN; are there others? I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side-effect of some environmental factor.

mjfl 9y ago
I don't even think CERN, Higgs boson included, is worth the man hours or cash invested... HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.
- stctgion 9y ago
  Are you defining "worth it" as whether there is a profit to be made at some point? How much would you have paid for the higgs? Are some pieces of science best left in the dark because they cost too much?
  - mjfl 9y ago
    YES. There is no limit to the cost of modern science, but resources are still scarce in the real world and we cannot afford to spend unlimited funds on projects that will not pay off in human flourishing in the near future. To answer your first question that is the profit to be made and it absolutely is necessary to consider when directing tax dollars which could otherwise be spent feeding starving people or curing dying people. I would have paid $80 for the Higgs.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      While you are correct to say that scarce resources means we can’t do everything, pure/fundamental research like the LHC tends to have extremely high payoffs several decades after it is completed. Nobody knows what exactly, if we did we could focus on that stuff in particular, but its one of the best things we can do to grow the economy. (Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that’s about three LHCs depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).
      - mjfl 9y ago
        Actually, good basic research has a much quicker payoff scale, like 10-20 years. Transistors, fiber optics, lasers, paid off almost immediately- and were invented ON PURPOSE by the way, in order to facilitate better communication for AT&T. And I would pay $80 because I'm personally interested, but I'm the 1%, and I don't think you should force people to pay for it, therefore you should revise your estimate to .03 LHCs.
        ben_w 9y ago
        You’re taking a bunch of things deliberately invented to solve an existing problem as an example of fundamental research paying off quickly? Counterexamples: one of the early prime number researchers was proud that his work had no use at all, and now it’s the foundation of a major class of encryption. That was a century or two. Or, Maxwell published “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” in 1873, and it took another 30 years to become voice radio. Of course, as the LHC only discovered the Higgs in 2012, even your 10 year lowball would be four years in the future.
        mpfundstein 9y ago
        I think you have no idea how (fundamental) research works...
    - FridgeSeal 9y ago
      "Groundbreaking science is too expensive, we are only capable of investing in one thing at a time!!!" Like it on not, science and research is what powers humanity flourishing, if you want to get your pitchfork out about misused resources, go complain about corporate tax cuts or money invested in pointless ad-tech, not science.
      - mjfl 9y ago
        > Like it on not, science and research is what powers humanity flourishing Not all science and research though. That's the whole point of my argument - we should direct funds towards projects that actually have tangible benefit to humanity in the future. I will eat my shoe if any application of neutrinos comes about in the next 50 years. Transistors? Great - those weren't invented by accident, and John Bardeen certainly deserves his two Nobel Prizes.
        GlennS 9y ago
        Isn't there already an application of neutrinos: to detect nuclear material (so weapons inspection and so on)?
        ben_w 9y ago
        Remote monitoring nuclear reactors for signs of weapons development: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/593/1/012004/pdf http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/593/1/01... Communication through any obstacles, including (in principle) the entire diameter of the planet: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847 https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
        mjfl 9y ago
        Considering we have already have cheap things to detect nuclear proliferation, such as seismic detectors that have proven effective w/ North Korea and how expensive a neutrino detection system would be to build, I don't see any marginal benefit to humanity there. Considering the fact that you would need to build a beamline for any transmission of a neutrino message and a 5 ton detector to receive it (unlikely to be reduced since it's so hard to stop neutrinos) I'll stick with my > 50 year timeline for neutrino message passing being used in any practical sense. Maybe they could put it in a nuclear sub, but the design process would take 50 years, thanks to similar incentives built into the military industrial complex.
- riffraff 9y ago
  ITER started as an equal partnership between EU, US, USSR (yep, not Russia) and Japan. It is insanely expensive, but I wouldn't consider it a Europe-specific madness.
- randomsearch 9y ago
  Not worth the WWW? (Amongst many other things)
  - mjfl 9y ago
    If you had the power to view into parallel universes and told me TBL would not have invented the integration of hypertext and the TCP system without the support of CERN I would begrudgingly give CERN funding until 1995.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      But that's the thing: before 1995, you couldn't know that you had to keep funding the CERN to get the WWW. So you'd have cut it off before, and now you'd be arguing that you made the right call, because we wouldn't know that the WWW would have been a thing.
      - mjfl 9y ago
        But it is very unlikely that another parallel universe doesn't have TBL or someone else inventing WWW in another setting. I would argue that the invention of the web was dependent on TBL, not CERN.
        icebraining 9y ago
        I'm not sure we would have computers at all if we followed your approach.
        mjfl 9y ago
        I think you're trying to paint me as someone who is anti-science, I'm the opposite. I have extreme confidence in what our scientists can do, especially when you stop giving them easy money. Note that CERN also employs thousands of very smart particle physics PHDs who's median contribution to humanity is roughly equivalent to a giant land sloth's. I want to demand much more from them, and I'm also extremely confident that they can deliver.
- throwaway77384 9y ago
  While everyone in these comments seems to try to defend these great European projects on their merit alone, I'll try a different approach. In my opinion, these projects are one of the last great human efforts to inspire generations with things that are not just about making more profit. But it's not about this project or that. It's about far more. You say this money should go to hungry people instead. Let's say it's not just starving children in Africa, but maybe even a project to feed the homeless or help under-privileged children get an education...even in that case, do you actually think that if all that money was freed up, this would actually happen? Of course it wouldn't. It would go to line even more pockets of some faceless international organisation / corporation / hedge fund / military investment buddies of some regime. There is no way in hell that any poor or under-privileged person would benefit from the abandonment of these projects. No chance whatsoever. What little money there is, is all concentrated in the hands of a few people who have absolutely no other mission in life other than accumulating more money and power. They have made most science happen for private sector profit-reaping already. This is some of the last stuff done for all mankind. We'd be making a huge mistake abandoning it. Again, the people in charge will not help the poor or homeless. If you wanted to do that, you should tax multinational corporations and get rid of tax havens. There is a kind of money hidden away in tax loopholes all over the globe that would make the LHC, HBP, heck, the ISS look like chump change. Look there first.
sveme 9y ago
I'm familiar with the European Molecular Biology Lab [1] (worked there), which is one of the best research centres in cell and molecular biology as well as bioinformatics in the world. The only real prerequisite for working there is excellence. It seems like this new AI proposal is modeled after the EMBL model, with one headquarter and several other locations around Europe. At least in the case of the EMBL, it worked incredibly well and created a great joint European atmosphere which really motivated everyone to do their best. Obviously, there is currently much more money in AI in the industry, so I guess it will be hard for such a research centre to compete with industry. The wage differential between biotech industry and EMBL is much less than that of a hypothetical EAIL and the software industry. [1] https://www.embl.org/ https://www.embl.org/
- laingc 9y ago
  I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I think you've missed the question that GP was asking. > are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? If we're talking about EMBL in Heidelberg, we can say with confidence that (along with DKFZ) it's a huge drawcard for the University. But the GP asked if it had attracted talent in some industry and kept it for the long term. Can we really say that the Rhein-Neckar region has really attracted big private sector biotech investment, on par with a place like Basel? I don't think so. By a pure coincidence of geography, companies like Roche have a presence in the general area (Mannheim I believe), but I don't think you can argue that any deliberate actions by EMBL or DKFZ have led to deep private sector talent pools. I actually think you could turn this argument around pretty easily and show that even enormous investments in institutions like EMBL and DKFZ don't actually create the private sector spinoffs that central planners would imagine. Like the GP, I suspect that there is a combination of environmental factors at work, that we can't fully identify at present.
  - sveme 9y ago
    Maybe you are right and I misunderstood his question. I was under the impression that he asked whether a European governmental facility could aggregate talent in some place and came up with an example where this worked and why I believe an EAIL could work as well. I'm not sure that either of us understood his emphasis on industry. Regarding your point: Heidelberg and Cambridge have both profited to some extent, but I'm convinced that a place like EMBL has profited Europe as a whole much more, keeping excellent talent on the continent and attracting excellent talent to the continent. Bork, Ellenberg and co. would have otherwise been long gone to the US and with them a lot of excellent scientists. Regarding cluster formation: I agree, EMBL and DKFZ alone are not sufficient for creating the critical mass that you see in Boston and SF. You need a couple of big companies as well as the academic infrastructure to get these clusters up and running. I guess only Munich has the critical mass in certain sectors in Germany.
carlmr 9y ago
>are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? Many, I'm not sure, but how about Silicon Valley? Which was borne mostly out of government backing of military projects and the university system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(1971_and_later) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(1971_a...
ItsMe000001 9y ago
Answering in a wider context: Silicon Valley: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo It wasn't planned as such, but the outcome is a result of unlimited debt-based US government spending in WWII to win the electronics war. Only after creating very fertile soil did private enterprise enter the picture. Also, anything war related, ever, including rockets, airplanes, anything that shoots and explodes, submarines, the Internet,... Part of it is that the public is perfectly willing to have "central planning" and pretty much unlimited tax-based spending for military purposes, but try to do get them to accept the same for civilian purposes... You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning. Then there is the entire exploration of the world, done mostly by governments, and even when it was private entities it was with very heavy government support and involvement. Did you know that Gregor Mendel, the monk who did the experiment with the peas that is seen as the basis for genetics, was not an underemployed monk working on his own, but part of a very organized business-government-church effort to support local industry? I think it was about how to get better wool producing sheep: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 (MIT Prof. Eric S. Lander) The "market" is not magic that does everything. It only works well under specific circumstances - and those are exactly the scenarios the books will pick. Read (economist) authors like Ha-Joon Chang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang).
- ghaff 9y ago
  >You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning. Yes, although in the case of Japan (MITI and the like), there are counterexamples like the Fifth Generation project. In addition, there were economists like Lester Thurow in the US arguing strongly at the time that the US had to follow Japan's lead in industrial planning to create cosortia like SEMATECH, which largely didn't pan out.
  - vram22 9y ago
    >Fifth Generation project Does anyone know what eventually happened to it? I had read about it a bit in the media at the time, it seemed like an ambitious project. I remember they were going to use Prolog instead of Lisp (for whatever reason). Did any concrete benefits come out of the research, for example, that are widely applied in (any) industry? Interesting to know.
T-A 9y ago
I find the comparison with CERN (made by the Guardian article; CERN is not mentioned in the open letter) misleading and somewhat troubling. As of 2016 (last year for which there are figures; new ones should be out in a couple of weeks) CERN had 82 research physicists on staff, out of a total headcount of 2531 [1]. The vast majority of researchers working at CERN are associates (982), users and visitors from other institutions, mainly universities in member countries. CERN's primary role is to provide shared facilities (accelerators and detectors) which are too expensive for individual members, not to employ researchers. The equivalent in machine learning would be shared computing, data collection & labeling resources capable of competing with what Google, Facebook etc have to offer. A state-led initiative on shared computing resources might be more cost-effective than buying time on Google Cloud, but the main thing could well turn out to be pooling data from national databases. Yay? [1] https://cds.cern.ch/collection/CERN%20Annual%20Personnel%20Statistics https://cds.cern.ch/collection/CERN%20Annual%20Personnel%20S...
nunya213 9y ago
OpenAI, Allen Institute for AI, MIRI, etc. are quite successful in the AI industry. Those are all in the US and pay competitive salaries though. It seems to me that Salary is a primary driver here, why stay at Cambridge for 40k gbp/yr when you could do the same research at Google Brain for $200k+ but if those two numbers aren't so out of wack I think it becomes a much more difficult choice.

mjfl 9y ago

I don't even think CERN, Higgs boson included, is worth the man hours or cash invested... HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.

stctgion 9y ago
Are you defining "worth it" as whether there is a profit to be made at some point? How much would you have paid for the higgs? Are some pieces of science best left in the dark because they cost too much?
- mjfl 9y ago
  YES. There is no limit to the cost of modern science, but resources are still scarce in the real world and we cannot afford to spend unlimited funds on projects that will not pay off in human flourishing in the near future. To answer your first question that is the profit to be made and it absolutely is necessary to consider when directing tax dollars which could otherwise be spent feeding starving people or curing dying people. I would have paid $80 for the Higgs.
  - ben_w 9y ago
    While you are correct to say that scarce resources means we can’t do everything, pure/fundamental research like the LHC tends to have extremely high payoffs several decades after it is completed. Nobody knows what exactly, if we did we could focus on that stuff in particular, but its one of the best things we can do to grow the economy. (Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that’s about three LHCs depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).
    - mjfl 9y ago
      Actually, good basic research has a much quicker payoff scale, like 10-20 years. Transistors, fiber optics, lasers, paid off almost immediately- and were invented ON PURPOSE by the way, in order to facilitate better communication for AT&T. And I would pay $80 because I'm personally interested, but I'm the 1%, and I don't think you should force people to pay for it, therefore you should revise your estimate to .03 LHCs.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        You’re taking a bunch of things deliberately invented to solve an existing problem as an example of fundamental research paying off quickly? Counterexamples: one of the early prime number researchers was proud that his work had no use at all, and now it’s the foundation of a major class of encryption. That was a century or two. Or, Maxwell published “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” in 1873, and it took another 30 years to become voice radio. Of course, as the LHC only discovered the Higgs in 2012, even your 10 year lowball would be four years in the future.
      - mpfundstein 9y ago
        I think you have no idea how (fundamental) research works...
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    "Groundbreaking science is too expensive, we are only capable of investing in one thing at a time!!!" Like it on not, science and research is what powers humanity flourishing, if you want to get your pitchfork out about misused resources, go complain about corporate tax cuts or money invested in pointless ad-tech, not science.
    - mjfl 9y ago
      > Like it on not, science and research is what powers humanity flourishing Not all science and research though. That's the whole point of my argument - we should direct funds towards projects that actually have tangible benefit to humanity in the future. I will eat my shoe if any application of neutrinos comes about in the next 50 years. Transistors? Great - those weren't invented by accident, and John Bardeen certainly deserves his two Nobel Prizes.
      - GlennS 9y ago
        Isn't there already an application of neutrinos: to detect nuclear material (so weapons inspection and so on)?
      - ben_w 9y ago
        Remote monitoring nuclear reactors for signs of weapons development: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/593/1/012004/pdf http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/593/1/01... Communication through any obstacles, including (in principle) the entire diameter of the planet: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847 https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
        mjfl 9y ago
        Considering we have already have cheap things to detect nuclear proliferation, such as seismic detectors that have proven effective w/ North Korea and how expensive a neutrino detection system would be to build, I don't see any marginal benefit to humanity there. Considering the fact that you would need to build a beamline for any transmission of a neutrino message and a 5 ton detector to receive it (unlikely to be reduced since it's so hard to stop neutrinos) I'll stick with my > 50 year timeline for neutrino message passing being used in any practical sense. Maybe they could put it in a nuclear sub, but the design process would take 50 years, thanks to similar incentives built into the military industrial complex.
riffraff 9y ago
ITER started as an equal partnership between EU, US, USSR (yep, not Russia) and Japan. It is insanely expensive, but I wouldn't consider it a Europe-specific madness.
randomsearch 9y ago
Not worth the WWW? (Amongst many other things)
- mjfl 9y ago
  If you had the power to view into parallel universes and told me TBL would not have invented the integration of hypertext and the TCP system without the support of CERN I would begrudgingly give CERN funding until 1995.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    But that's the thing: before 1995, you couldn't know that you had to keep funding the CERN to get the WWW. So you'd have cut it off before, and now you'd be arguing that you made the right call, because we wouldn't know that the WWW would have been a thing.
    - mjfl 9y ago
      But it is very unlikely that another parallel universe doesn't have TBL or someone else inventing WWW in another setting. I would argue that the invention of the web was dependent on TBL, not CERN.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        I'm not sure we would have computers at all if we followed your approach.
        mjfl 9y ago
        I think you're trying to paint me as someone who is anti-science, I'm the opposite. I have extreme confidence in what our scientists can do, especially when you stop giving them easy money. Note that CERN also employs thousands of very smart particle physics PHDs who's median contribution to humanity is roughly equivalent to a giant land sloth's. I want to demand much more from them, and I'm also extremely confident that they can deliver.
throwaway77384 9y ago
While everyone in these comments seems to try to defend these great European projects on their merit alone, I'll try a different approach. In my opinion, these projects are one of the last great human efforts to inspire generations with things that are not just about making more profit. But it's not about this project or that. It's about far more. You say this money should go to hungry people instead. Let's say it's not just starving children in Africa, but maybe even a project to feed the homeless or help under-privileged children get an education...even in that case, do you actually think that if all that money was freed up, this would actually happen? Of course it wouldn't. It would go to line even more pockets of some faceless international organisation / corporation / hedge fund / military investment buddies of some regime. There is no way in hell that any poor or under-privileged person would benefit from the abandonment of these projects. No chance whatsoever. What little money there is, is all concentrated in the hands of a few people who have absolutely no other mission in life other than accumulating more money and power. They have made most science happen for private sector profit-reaping already. This is some of the last stuff done for all mankind. We'd be making a huge mistake abandoning it. Again, the people in charge will not help the poor or homeless. If you wanted to do that, you should tax multinational corporations and get rid of tax havens. There is a kind of money hidden away in tax loopholes all over the globe that would make the LHC, HBP, heck, the ISS look like chump change. Look there first.

sveme 9y ago

I'm familiar with the European Molecular Biology Lab [1] (worked there), which is one of the best research centres in cell and molecular biology as well as bioinformatics in the world. The only real prerequisite for working there is excellence. It seems like this new AI proposal is modeled after the EMBL model, with one headquarter and several other locations around Europe. At least in the case of the EMBL, it worked incredibly well and created a great joint European atmosphere which really motivated everyone to do their best. Obviously, there is currently much more money in AI in the industry, so I guess it will be hard for such a research centre to compete with industry. The wage differential between biotech industry and EMBL is much less than that of a hypothetical EAIL and the software industry. [1] https://www.embl.org/ https://www.embl.org/

laingc 9y ago
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I think you've missed the question that GP was asking. > are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? If we're talking about EMBL in Heidelberg, we can say with confidence that (along with DKFZ) it's a huge drawcard for the University. But the GP asked if it had attracted talent in some industry and kept it for the long term. Can we really say that the Rhein-Neckar region has really attracted big private sector biotech investment, on par with a place like Basel? I don't think so. By a pure coincidence of geography, companies like Roche have a presence in the general area (Mannheim I believe), but I don't think you can argue that any deliberate actions by EMBL or DKFZ have led to deep private sector talent pools. I actually think you could turn this argument around pretty easily and show that even enormous investments in institutions like EMBL and DKFZ don't actually create the private sector spinoffs that central planners would imagine. Like the GP, I suspect that there is a combination of environmental factors at work, that we can't fully identify at present.
- sveme 9y ago
  Maybe you are right and I misunderstood his question. I was under the impression that he asked whether a European governmental facility could aggregate talent in some place and came up with an example where this worked and why I believe an EAIL could work as well. I'm not sure that either of us understood his emphasis on industry. Regarding your point: Heidelberg and Cambridge have both profited to some extent, but I'm convinced that a place like EMBL has profited Europe as a whole much more, keeping excellent talent on the continent and attracting excellent talent to the continent. Bork, Ellenberg and co. would have otherwise been long gone to the US and with them a lot of excellent scientists. Regarding cluster formation: I agree, EMBL and DKFZ alone are not sufficient for creating the critical mass that you see in Boston and SF. You need a couple of big companies as well as the academic infrastructure to get these clusters up and running. I guess only Munich has the critical mass in certain sectors in Germany.

carlmr 9y ago

>are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? Many, I'm not sure, but how about Silicon Valley? Which was borne mostly out of government backing of military projects and the university system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(1971_and_later) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(1971_a...

ItsMe000001 9y ago

Answering in a wider context: Silicon Valley: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo It wasn't planned as such, but the outcome is a result of unlimited debt-based US government spending in WWII to win the electronics war. Only after creating very fertile soil did private enterprise enter the picture. Also, anything war related, ever, including rockets, airplanes, anything that shoots and explodes, submarines, the Internet,... Part of it is that the public is perfectly willing to have "central planning" and pretty much unlimited tax-based spending for military purposes, but try to do get them to accept the same for civilian purposes... You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning. Then there is the entire exploration of the world, done mostly by governments, and even when it was private entities it was with very heavy government support and involvement. Did you know that Gregor Mendel, the monk who did the experiment with the peas that is seen as the basis for genetics, was not an underemployed monk working on his own, but part of a very organized business-government-church effort to support local industry? I think it was about how to get better wool producing sheep: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 (MIT Prof. Eric S. Lander) The "market" is not magic that does everything. It only works well under specific circumstances - and those are exactly the scenarios the books will pick. Read (economist) authors like Ha-Joon Chang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang).

ghaff 9y ago
>You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning. Yes, although in the case of Japan (MITI and the like), there are counterexamples like the Fifth Generation project. In addition, there were economists like Lester Thurow in the US arguing strongly at the time that the US had to follow Japan's lead in industrial planning to create cosortia like SEMATECH, which largely didn't pan out.
- vram22 9y ago
  >Fifth Generation project Does anyone know what eventually happened to it? I had read about it a bit in the media at the time, it seemed like an ambitious project. I remember they were going to use Prolog instead of Lisp (for whatever reason). Did any concrete benefits come out of the research, for example, that are widely applied in (any) industry? Interesting to know.

T-A 9y ago

I find the comparison with CERN (made by the Guardian article; CERN is not mentioned in the open letter) misleading and somewhat troubling. As of 2016 (last year for which there are figures; new ones should be out in a couple of weeks) CERN had 82 research physicists on staff, out of a total headcount of 2531 [1]. The vast majority of researchers working at CERN are associates (982), users and visitors from other institutions, mainly universities in member countries. CERN's primary role is to provide shared facilities (accelerators and detectors) which are too expensive for individual members, not to employ researchers. The equivalent in machine learning would be shared computing, data collection & labeling resources capable of competing with what Google, Facebook etc have to offer. A state-led initiative on shared computing resources might be more cost-effective than buying time on Google Cloud, but the main thing could well turn out to be pooling data from national databases. Yay? [1] https://cds.cern.ch/collection/CERN%20Annual%20Personnel%20Statistics https://cds.cern.ch/collection/CERN%20Annual%20Personnel%20S...

nunya213 9y ago

OpenAI, Allen Institute for AI, MIRI, etc. are quite successful in the AI industry. Those are all in the US and pay competitive salaries though. It seems to me that Salary is a primary driver here, why stay at Cambridge for 40k gbp/yr when you could do the same research at Google Brain for $200k+ but if those two numbers aren't so out of wack I think it becomes a much more difficult choice.