Comment by smeeth
5 months ago
I could be totally wrong (please correct me if so), but IMO there are two things happening that weren't totally discussed.
1) My understanding is that most the "researchers" and even students at ATI have a main role at a home institution. Really the question should be something more like "did ATI funding help advance UK research generally?" not "was ATI able to claim its own successes?"
2) Nobody has really mentioned how PhDs are a little different in the UK. E.g. you propose a topic -> research for three years -> receive PhD. In the US its more like research for 2+ years -> find a promising area -> do groundbreaking work over 1+ years -> receive PhD. In other words, its significantly easier to change your research direction in the US, of course its easier to miss out on things like the LLM explosion.
Yes, I remember somebody doing a PhD in the US on theorem proving for a few years, but his last year he focused on doing deep learning work, did his PhD thesis on it, and got hired by OpenAI.
> really the question should be something more like "did ATI funding help advance UK research generally?" not "was ATI able to claim its own successes?"
This is a reasonable objection, but imho misses the point.
Any entity that's unable to account for its positive externalities will underestimate its value. This happened to the Turing. Universities did not want to lose their staff to secondments or buyouts, and Turing cancelled major independent programs like their PhD offerings. Leads fought for their universities, as the article notes---not necessarily to make Turing itself better!
While recent cuts/"realignments" are painful, they also have re-focused support for projects at scale---projects that are substantially more than an afternoon a week for two academics. It's still, in many cases, subsidized consulting for UK businesses w/ dubious scientific merit, but that's a broader issue with the UK's research culture.