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Comment by bayindirh

18 days ago

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.

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bayindirh

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misiek08  18 days ago

"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.

badlogic  18 days ago

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.

  • sunshine-o  18 days ago

    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.

  • rickdeckard  18 days ago

    > 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...

    • closewith  18 days ago

      Graphene Flagship was an irredeemable disaster. €1 B pumped into research and commercialisation and the result is a DOA graphene industry in the EU, left in the dust by China and the US.

      Clean Sky Joint Undertaking was also a disaster that missed all its targets.

      As stated elsewhere, CERN is a cautionary tale - the LHC is a vestige of a time when Europe was an economic and scientific powerhouse. If the last 15-20 years we have become an also-ran to the US and China.

      There's an endless list of these soft failed Horizon projects:

      * Human Brain Project * European Processor Initiative * Innovative Medicines Initiative * LIGHTest * The Once-Only Principle Project * OpenAIRE * Quantum Flagship

      And on and on. No results. No ROI.

      2 replies →

hedgew  18 days ago

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.

closewith  18 days ago

> 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.

  • bayindirh  18 days ago

    > 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.

    • misiek08  18 days ago

      You are maybe in 0.005%. If project has even a presentation at the end it’s already being considered successful. And I thought it’s maybe Poland only, but Germant and France is the same (I’ve seen this myself, not heard from 3rd party)

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    • krallistic  18 days ago

      Start-ups deliver something much more complicated/different than these research projects.

      If the whole research project at the end actually delivers a somewhat coherent prototype, it's seen as a huge success.

      Most start-ups start with a proof-of-concept prototype to transform it into an economically viable product.

      So, comparing these success rates does not make sense. Multiple research groups can deliver rough prototypes at the end and celebrate their "huge success". In most fields, there can be only a few economically surviving startups...

      2 replies →

    • Lionga  18 days ago

      What did you actually deliver in which project? Not really expecting a real answer here as far as I have seen all Horizon Programms are just trash that has no commercial use.

ngcazz  18 days ago

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.

lifty  18 days ago

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.

Maken  18 days ago

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.

menaerus  18 days ago

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.

  • bayindirh  18 days ago

    This is a Horizon grant, meaning:

        - There's continuous reporting, and money is not guaranteed.
    - You can be removed from the project by not meeting project goals on time.
    - (In this case) There are corporations which are planning to commercialize this thing.
    - There's a concrete and sound roadmap, and it's evaluated in a competition by an independent body and got selected.
    - Without a sound landscape survey, you can't get this type of grant, so free market forces are included.
    - ...and more (I'm trying to be concise).

    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.

    • closewith  18 days ago

      > IOW, these kinds of projects are not parades for free money.

      No, they are subsidies for uncompetitive R&D teams. They are spectacularly inefficient, for all the reasons you mention. Teams specialise in Horizon funding, not actual progress.

      > Lastly, I don't get the grant money. It's just deposited to institution account. I have no monetary or material gain from this.

      Aha, so your team is funded by Horizon. What's the old saying about people and understanding where their paycheques come from?

      7 replies →

    • menaerus  18 days ago

      I am familiar with Horizon and EU grant funds and how these projects are managed - basically a big waste of time and money without concrete results with plenty of bureaucracy crawling the project ideas and resources to the halt. I am not saying that because I think people are not hard working, I am just saying that the process as it is is not fit to produce something (market) competitive. Process is there to serve its own purpose.

      You mention deliverables as document specs? Those are not the deliverables. The deliverables are products that gain traction and see success on the market or research topics that gain traction in the academia because of their groundbreaking methods. That in sufficiently short period of time because otherwise you cannot remain competetive. Leaving "commercialization" on the table while we figure out something is also what is wrong with the system. The world does not wait for EU to commercialize the idea that has been put into a document 5 years ago.

      I can give concrete examples of many large EU companies and institutions, because they are just that and they have a lot of power, getting millions of EURs just to produce BIG nothing. Innovation is not at the heart of these projects. Mostly subpar engineers with no deep science research.

      Can you list me few examples of successful projects you have in mind? Why, for example, Mistral AI isn't among them?

      1 reply →

    • sarusso  18 days ago

      "They result in deliverables"

      I had a _so_ different experience after being involved in two of them...

  • maksimur  18 days ago

    > 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.

    • menaerus  18 days ago

      I won't disagree but it's the most effective way of getting an edge over the competition. Without the "reward and punishment" system in place, how else do you get that extra mile from your engineers? How else do you find an incentive to reduce the fat in the management structure? USA companies know how to do this very well and you cannot remain competitive unless you're willing to do the same or find some other similar system.

  • TeMPOraL  18 days ago

    You mean a good environment for doing R&D?

    • bayindirh  18 days ago

      Yes, we do a great deal of R&D, too. It looks boring from outside, but it enables things for us and researchers. Oh, and we give the patches back to the tools we use.

DocTomoe  18 days ago

When has it ever worked?

Remember the EU Search Engine project, Quaero, and its equally failed successor, Theseus? No? I thought so.

ShareTheVista  18 days ago

Can you tell us about a project like this that worked?

  • varjag  18 days ago

    The Large Hadron Collider clearly works and is infinitely more complex than yet another language model.

    • closewith  18 days ago

      The LHC is comparably complex to LLMs and CERN is a cautionary tale. The web was invented there and yet the vast majority of the subsequent innovation and economic benefit coalesced in the US because the European countries were culturally unable to capitalise on it.

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    • Yizahi  18 days ago

      The LHC indeed works, as a device. But what was it's purpose and did it do "meaningful" stuff over its lifetime? LHC is a yet another collider which basically can be boiled to the simple idea:

      Some scientists invent hypotheses with no basis in reality, and say that they can be proven with a big and expensive collider. When that collider is being built and fail to find the requisite particles, those same scientists say they need a bigger and more expensive collider. GoTo 01.

      A lot of these scientists fail to explain what will happen when their hypotheses won't find the requisite particles, essentially generating meaningless papers which are blind stabs at reality. It's like saying that leprechauns exist, but to see them we need a 100 billion euro device. And if we do build it fail to see it, then whoops, it wasn't enough.

      tl;dr: LHC is not a particularly good example of proper scientific achievement. More like an achievement in PR and budget grants. Per positive scientific discovery produced there.

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CrimsonRain  18 days ago

All talk. No show. That's EU.

I'll believe it works after they finally have one success

  • input_sh  18 days ago

    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?

    • closewith  18 days ago

      7 languages and a feature nobody to a rounding error uses? No, I don't consider that to be a research, economic, or technical success.

      Honestly, I'm not sure if you posted this is support of Horizon or against? The Horizon budget for 2021-2027 is €95.5 billion or ~€15 billion per annum. If a headline "success" is an unfinished implementation of translation in Firefox of a translation engine (Marian) built by the Microsoft Translator team, then it's safe to say Horizon is an unqualified failure.

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    • CrimsonRain  18 days ago

      Depends on how much money has been spent.

      Also money will be better spent with one common language instead of wasting so much time, resources and inconveniencing people with so many languages in this area.