Comment by isoprophlex
18 days ago
I'm HIGHLY sceptical. The academics will love it, because they get money. But look at that list of parties involved. More than twenty parties supplying people; none of them will have this initiative on the top of their list of loyalties and priorities.
Meaning, everyone will talk, noone will take charge, some millions change hands and we continue with business as usual.
Instead this should have been a single new non-profit or whatever with deep pockets that convinces smart people to give their 100% for a while.
Death by committee. And I say this as someone who was in a multi-million research program across ~8 universities, that was going to do "groundbreaking" research. After a few months everyone was back to pushing their own lines of research, there was almost zero collaboration let alone common language or goal setting.
I can see that you're unfamiliar with how EU grants and how these project collections work, but I don't have much time to address this with great detail.
As a person who's in this type of projects for a long time, what I can say is "it works", because people do not compete with each other, but will build it together.
What I can say is, if they have came this far, there's already plans about what to do, and how to do, and none of the parties are inexperienced in these kinds of things.
"It works!" is the only thing that will be visible on web page after hundreds of milions will be burned. I’m observing few of such „unprecedented” cooperation projects from EU funds. A lot of meetings, a lot of managers, plenty of very unskilled people creating mess and few names doing presentations so companies will believe everybody know what are they doing. Same from company side - they need being in those projects to comply with stupid EU rules about being eco.
Ball of mud.
Europe runs its space programme in this way and so far it has pretty good track record. There are more ways to build stuff than the worship of personality.
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As someone who has lived through Eurostar and Horizon 2020, and who has participated as both a researcher and corporate partner, I can say: it does not work.
Unless by work you mean "successfully passed the post-project review by non-experts based on a bunch of slides"
Point at a single project of this sort that had any tangible output that's still in use.
I once registered as an "expert" on those EU related websites in the hope to be invited to an event where I could network.
Next thing I know one of those Horizon 2020 project send me 20 proposals to evaluate and select by next week. Each of them was 50-100 pages long, mostly BS.
I couldn't really do any real due diligence and I don't believe anybody did any on me. So just create register fake domain names to get a fake corporate email addresses, create a fake LinkedIn profiles and you can have a significant weight in the selection process for grants. It is that simple.
I remember it made me feel sick in my stomach to think that the money that would be given through my evaluation was most likely equivalent to one year of tax revenue from a random honest small business.
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> Point at a single project of this sort that had any tangible output that's still in use.
Not sure what is your limiting factor (just universities + industry consortiums or explicit IT projects?).
Graphene Flagship might be an example, with their research on Graphene they contributed to the foundation of more efficient batteries and solar panels, innovation in automotive and commercial products and so on.
Clean Sky Joint Undertaking (CSJU) also had quite some impact on the industry (I think it was part of EU's Horizon 2020). They worked on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions and noise of Aircrafts and contributed quite a bit to the European industry (Rotor engine innovations, advanced greener materials, etc.)
And I think the discovery of the Higgs boson was also the result of a European Research consortium with CERN...
So yeah, Europe is surely not the center of all innovation and economic efficiency, but I wouldn't demonize every attempt to change that...
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My experience from these projects is the opposite. The projects are always secondary priorities for participants, and the difficulty of coordinating some dozen entirely separate organisations towards something actually productive is immense. In practice each participant independently spends the money they get on something lightly relevant, and the occasional coordination meetings are spent on planning how to fulfill the reporting requirements of the grant.
Business and research are difficult enough even when done by tightly knit teams and constantly tested against real world systems and customer feedback. The idea that a hodgepodge of organisations can achieve poorly defined yet aspirational goals on a low budget is massively misguided.
> I can see that you're unfamiliar with how EU grants and how these project collections work, but I don't have much time to address this with great detail.
This is a take that can only come from someone who is dependent on Horizon, because I don't think any independent observer could look at Horizon projects and say they just work.
> This is a take that can only come from someone who is dependent on Horizon.
No, I'm not dependent on Horizon Programme. I just look at what we did, the outcomes, and talk from that point.
Maybe our sphere is one of the ones which deliver. I can't see the whole thing, it's too big to observe. Even if we're in the 5% which delivers, which is same with the startup scene, which is loudly applauded because it's an incredibly well working system.
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Having worked on an FP7 programme myself and having a family member involved in project audits, I’d say some skepticism is warranted—particularly regarding the incentives that attract private sector partners and the talent they actually allocate once funds are secured.
Funding is tied to employee qualifications and effectively subsidises salaries, which creates room for misalignment. No-shows of allocated employees were not uncommon, since a company willing to accept lower-quality deliverables can assign junior employees to do the work at a fraction of the cost, while the salary difference for their PhDs simply becomes added margin.
Can you tell me please what you worked on and where I can see the output? I’ve been adjacent to these kind of efforts and the only thing I can say is that I’m highly skeptical of your claims.
In the case of Quaero [1] "it did not work". Sure, all involved parties were praising the project and by constantly shifting goalposts they could label it a success, but in the end it was a huge waste of money, sucked in by the usual suspects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
> it was a huge waste of money, sucked in by the usual suspects
other example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia-X
While I do think EU grants are a good thing, I'm sceptic about these too-big-to-fail multi-national projects. I still remember the Human Brain Project.
I largely see this type of collaboration as a very inefficient form of a distributed company (team) where members of that team do not have other incentive but to (mostly) collect points on research papers. There is no incentive to actually build a product in such a setting and there is no incentive to remain competitive since you cannot be fired, or penalized in some other form. And generally speaking, as an individual you don't care about the industry (market) competition since you mostly care about remaining relevant within your very narrow scope of your research topic. So, this is why this doesn't work. There is no coherent mass toward the same goal. Seemingly there is but there isn't.
This is a Horizon grant, meaning:
IOW, these kinds of projects are not parades for free money. You have to put considerable effort and brainpower to write the proposal, get selected and get the grant, and then you have to realize what you have written in your project to get that money.
I'm in many European projects of this kind for close to two decades. These projects do not result in papers. They result in deliverables (documents and what you are intending to build), and they deliver. While I can't go into details, the atmosphere is never an "academic" one, but it's connected to real world. We sometimes work with commercial entities to improve their know-how and abilities, too. Many of the projects have commercial partners which commercialize these technologies, esp in earth/ecosystem observation.
Sometimes we support them for free, because they need to do the research to be able to show what they are doing for an initial grant. It's not about money, fame, having a corner office with free flowing grant money or travel.
People do this to improve the world around them and make an impact, and we don't fight over wins. We drink coffee and work hard to deliver what we promised.
Lastly, I don't get the grant money. It's just deposited to institution account. I have no monetary or material gain from this.
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> There is no incentive to actually build a product in such a setting and there is no incentive to remain competitive since you cannot be fired, or penalized in some other form
That sounds horrible and stressful to be honest.
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You mean a good environment for doing R&D?
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When has it ever worked?
Remember the EU Search Engine project, Quaero, and its equally failed successor, Theseus? No? I thought so.
Can you tell us about a project like this that worked?
The Large Hadron Collider clearly works and is infinitely more complex than yet another language model.
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They are not hard to find: The EU literally gives you access to all their projects in the CORDIS database:
https://cordis.europa.eu/
All talk. No show. That's EU.
I'll believe it works after they finally have one success
Would you consider for example Firefox' completely-local translations a success?
Directly funded by Horizon, made by a consortium of 4 European universities, now a part of Firefox?
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Ah, so you’ve been an academic before, then.
The problem is academic culture is corrupt, and it’s very hard to reverse the decay.
Simple example: one Russell Group UK university (like many others) was admitting students who couldn’t speak English. A lecturer on a technical subject found they were struggling to understand his course, in part due to the language barrier. Come the exam, most of the students failed. He was told to make the exam easier so they would pass. The lecturer involved is a well meaning kindly man who would consider himself very ethical. But he did what he was told and the students passed.
In such a system it’s hard to see how an individual can fix it. If he had protested, he’d have been gently moved aside and the exam would have been rewritten by someone else.
Research is similarly corrupt. Grants are written to match a call, and they promise the earth. Friends review them and score highly. Pals on the grant committee favour their friends. And it’s implicitly agreed that the outcomes don’t have to be achieved. You go back to doing your original research, or not doing much at all, or more likely figuring out how to get some papers published and writing more grant proposals.
The idealistic, actually interested in progressing the field, leave or are squeezed out, looked over for lectureships in favour of folks who bring in grants via bs and politics.
Choose a topic you know about. Go on the EPSRC website. Look at grants ten years ago and see what their promised outcomes were.
My only answer is that a project like this must be done by people hired from outside of academia, which at this point is probably corrupt beyond repair. I look back at previous generations and wonder how the hell so much advancement was achieved.
” The models will be developed within Europe's robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence.”
They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists.
> They may release something, but i doubt it will be more useful than what already exists.
I wouldn't put such prejudice in this thing. I'm not implying that you're wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that the model will be incompetent or inferior.
Also, don't forget. They'll open source it end to end. From data to training/testing code and everything in between.
The model itself might be useful in the end. But it's terrible industrial policy to kill your startups with regulation and then the state needs to step in, because private companies no longer want to work with you, or no new companies are created.
As someone who worked in several Eurescom research projects back in the early 90s and watched it all get steamrolled by actual pragmatic work done in telcos and US manufacturers, I have zero faith in this even as a political/independence gesture.
There are loads of people who think "there is no moat and Europe can do this" (including the Portuguese government, which announced a Portuguese LLM at WebSummit--which, hilariously, is being trained on a research "supercomputer" in Spain), and they have no idea how far (politically, economically and pragmatically) Europe's tech scene is from the US. Other than Mistral, of course.
> Death by committee.
This is how the EU works. It's the reason the EU has very little innovation compared to the USA.
> The academics will love it, because they get money.
Nice way to frame this.
I'm involved with IMI-BIGPICTURE, a similarly sized EU initiative (~70M funding). It's not that bad. Things will take a while to start moving but as long as all the players stay on the same page shit will get done. 10x slower than with a small team but some things can't be done in small teams
> The project aims to create a repository of digital copies of around 3 million slides covering a range of disease areas. This repository will then be used to develop artificial intelligence tools that could aid in the analysis of slides.
€70 MM to get the digital copies of 3 million slides. Speaks for itself.
Can't talk specifics but I worked with a perpetually failing startup that spun out of a very prestigious university. The company was lined with way too many professors. Their burn rate must have been incredible, based on the huge investments they got. Their product was already "meh" before the AI boom made it utterly obsolete. They made huge promises but delivered poor results (in an area where 90% accuracy was basically useless). They never seemed to iterate on the product. Suddenly (like almost overnight) we got word that they were out of money and were likely to cease operating. At the 11th hour some idiot bailed them out, likely because of their academic credentials. (Certainly not because of their IP, product or output capability). Or maybe it was sunken cost fallacy. Idk.
Anyway, they're still failing along, burning through a seemingly infinite runway. Academia FTW!
You just described all EU tech subsidies.