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.
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.
If your metric of innovation is the amount of rockets exploded at debuts you shouldn't bring up SpaceX really.
The EU had committed to a number of deep space and scientific instrument programmes spanning decades and seen them through to success. It operates its own GNSS constellation. It is second only to NASA. Calling it a failure is ridiculous.
I suspect the previous poster's metric of innovation was more along the lines of:
* developing the first meaningful fully-reusable first stage rocket, and continuing to develop it to the extent that no other launch systems are even in the same ballpark as regards cost, cadence, or mass to orbit
* developing, and continuing to develop, the only full-flow staged combustion rocket engine
* developing, and continuing to develop, a novel, completely-reusable, next-generation very-heavy-lift platform, before any of the competition have even caught with their previous generation
* (to your snarky point about explosions) demonstrating that moving fast, evolving designs quickly, and not being afraid to (be seen to) fail (in the short term, in the court of public opinion, etc.) in the pursuit of success is much better than the traditional conservative approach (e.g. NASA, Blue Origin, etc.)
I'm well aware that giving credit to anything related to Musk is increasingly difficult for some people at the moment, but let's give credit where it's due to SpaceX and its engineers.
The snarky point of explosions wasn't mine, the poster I replied to brought it up.
The rest of your points is really one item, launch vehicles. It's where the USA clearly has the lead (above everyone else, not just ESA in particular). The question was whether the EU can successfully manage complex projects and it clearly can, suggesting otherwise is delirious.
The previous poster was basically supportive of SpaceX, talked about innovation, and didn't mention explosions at all. You wrote "If your metric of innovation is the amount of rockets exploded at debuts you shouldn't bring up SpaceX really." I interpreted this as a snarky reference to the fact the lots of SpaceX rockets have blown up - mostly due to their different approach to development.
The comment implying that SpaceX isn't innovative is what I was replying to - that looking at the work that SpaceX does (and not the whole pantheon of other space-related work it's not involved in) it's demonstrably innovative in a way that ESA just isn't (e.g. with Ariane).
The poster I replied to brought up Ariane 5 crash as the example of ESA dysfunction while being very positive about SpaceX. SpaceX had lost plenty launch vehicles both in testing and with live payloads, just ask Zuckerberg. I pointed out the contradiction there.
> developing the first meaningful fully-reusable first stage rocket, and continuing to develop it to the extent that no other launch systems are even in the same ballpark as regards cost, cadence, or mass to orbit.
The space shuttle solid boosters were reusable, the only part of the space shuttle program that wasn't, was the big orange tank.
Eh, I knew someone was going to nit-pick this point, which was why I wrote "first meaningful fully-reusable first stage rocket" but obviously this wasn't enough. :)
It's the most expensive bug in history.
On the other hand, you are bringing up explosions of empty rockets that are launched as test, that's bad faith.
Look at the launch history and the Falcon 9 is simply more reliable than the Ariane 5:
I did not said it was a failure, I said, they do not have a "pretty good track record". ESA burn through EU money, and wont care to innovate as long as EU provide them unlimited money and dont pressure them. It's an ivory tower.
> The question was if the EU method of doing project works and it does in very unambiguous manner.
As the EU falls economically and scientifically behinds what used to be our peers, it's obvious that it _doesn't_ work. Refusing to recognise that reality is a spectacular example of the Ostrich effect,
Are you talking about Huygens? That was launched on a Titan IV in 1997(!) and landed in 2005!
In 1997, the EU was a global economic and scientific powerhouse. We're talking about the ossification in the last 15-20 years that has not only allowed the US to leapfrog Europe as the largest economy, but China too.
You are bordering on delusional with these comments.
>The US constellation isn’t as accurate as the newer networks, said Roberts, the Sydney-based professor. “It used to be GPS was out in front,” he said. Now, though, the EU’s Galileo is in the lead, with China’s BeiDou close behind, he said.
That would be expected for a system launched 33 years later, but in Galileo and GPS are identical for civilian use (and obviously no-one knows the military capabilities of Block III satellites as that's undisclosed).
GPS+Gailleo is the current SOTA, but it's nonsense to say Galileo is "best".
Galileo has signal authentication, GPS doesn't. In a world where GNSS spoofing is increasingly becoming a hazard to aviation and other applications, that's arguably critical.
for navigation using Code method GPS-tier is basically good enough.
for precise measurement you use phase measurement of the signal, and what you care about is good(low) DoP of constellation and amount of satellites within sight-line - not from which system they come(to oversimplfy it a bit)
Galileo did not start as an EU programme. China used to be member!
What other EU programmes did you have in mind? The EU's efforts not even seem comparable to the European Space Agency (which is not part of the EU) let alone NASA.
Different Europe. The ESA is is not an EU agency so it runs by its own rules, its members include several non-EU countries, it has a non-European "cooperating state" and its funding is direct from member states.
Canada is on the ESA governing council, and takes part in projects.
In the context of Eu grants being discussed in this thread, its financing arrangements are very different from those, so its irrelevant to discussing the effectiveness or not of those.
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.
Oh man hard to remember. I can just tell you it was not on the official EU website. It was on a thematic one that probably doesn't exist anymore, something like "The coalition for the development of X in Europe".
What I also discovered is often let's say the EU wants to give 10M to 10 projects in a particular domain. Then a there are companies specialised in applying as a project and saying: our project is actually to subdivide this 1M into 8 times 100K and we keep 200K as a fee (I am simplifying but that was the idea).
> 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...
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
This is foundational material and chemistry research, with UK, Germany and Spain at the forefront for an industry which will probably need another 10 years to fully unfold.
For sure other China and US were able to invest more, but should the EU have not invested at all?
> Clean Sky Joint Undertaking was also a disaster
Also here, based on which metric?
The cost was split in half among the EU and industry players, and those companies (i.e. Airbus, Saab, Rolls-Royce, Safran, Liebherr, Thales) are all still at the forefront of their respective industries, despite competition from much larger markets.
It's a sensible strategy to support them while steering aspects of their R&D towards a specific set of common goals for the EU.
Yeah, among others they had a goal of achieving a 50% cut in CO2 emissions just by improving fuel efficiency, a quite ambitious goal they didn't reach. But they set and co-funded the direction and achieved a 30% reduction.
They also had a goal of achieving 50% noise reduction for aircrafts, and ultimately developed concepts with up to 70% lower noise-production. Without such funding I doubt that such research would have even been conducted.
--
So yes, there's a much larger list of failed Horizon projects, fully agree. And many of them shouldn't even exist in hindsight. But it's research, it's supposed to be an uncertain field with uncertain commercial value. I rather have the EU fund 5 moonshots with 3 of them questionable than decide to not fund any research in Europe unless the commercial value is first proven by someone else.
There are areas I don't know how they would even be funded by a for-profit market without such initiatives, like the Rail Joint Undertaking which aims to develop and harmonize the European rail system across borders of EU countries.
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.
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)
It's not only Poland. I've had the misfortune of suffering through a couple Horizon projects, with partners from many European countries. Same experience as you had. "These are not serious people" sums it up.
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...
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
> 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?
That would have been a somewhat reasonable (although unconvincing) reply if you didn't also write 7 other lengthy comments in this thread that were 3 hours apart
Well, I think it's safe to say mission accomplished.
Your comments here are why entities have media policies. Probably thousands of peoples will have read your comments and the responses to them and many will have formed their first impression of Horizon from this thread.
The criticism here is the system, not the people. And you seem to defend the system which has been proved to be inefficient and shady. You also seem to take this personally which you really shouldn't. People here are also sharing their views and experience and you have to acknowledge that it doesn't have to necessarily reflect yours.
Of course, people don't have to agree with me, and I didn't take the issue personally, except that particular comment because of its tone and language.
There are other criticisms for the system, and I didn't either answer them, or answered more broadly. Again, what I have seen is the system was working for the parts I was in, and may not be working for the others, and I'm not defending the contrary.
Every coin has at least two sides, and I'm not a god. I can only comment on what I can see and experience.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Also in Germany, their leading solar energy technology became unprofitable in the global market and was sold to China (see what happened to Q-Cells [1]). The EU can publicly finance research all they want, but if the results of which gets profited by private interests of any nationality not necessarily EU countries how does that help the EU catch up?
But this does seem different since they plan on building open-source models which would benefit everyone equally (and no one in particular), it would just level the playing field more I guess?
I think this and things like MCP [2] are fantastic, they would make the LLM just one interchangeable piece you can buy from anywhere or host yourself.
LLMs are not "comparably complex" to LHC, they are perhaps 0.1% of the complexity from engineering POV. By any metric, from system design to physical infrastructure to run them.
They had to design a reference standard quality nanovoltmeter because HP/Agilent could not keep up with volume & cost. And it was only one among scores of side quests.
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.
LHC had confirmed the existence of Higgs boson, essentially validating then-hypothetical mechanism for emergence of mass. It also had ruled out a very popular, theoretically beautiful but as it turned out invalid direction of physics studies. You can argue whether it was worth the cost but it was a genuine, significant experimental achievement.
It was also certainly not a PR stunt as it was truly an insanely complex piece of engineering. It is one of humanity's largest technological undertakings ever. Projects of this scale are still beyond the means even of the world's richest oligarchs. But it is a fine example of the things you can achieve in an enormous but well functioning multi-national bureaucracy.
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.
I don't have the numbers at hand or know if they're even public somewhere, but telemetry shows that Firefox Translations is used a lot. Definitely on the list of successful new Firefox features.
(I'm a Mozilla employee, but I have not worked on Firefox Translations.)
Do they? I tried opening a French government site[1] and received the Firefox pop-up offering to translate the page. I did not have to enable anything in settings neither is the French language model downloaded. It seems translations are enabled by default.
I stand corrected on this point, the language packs now auto-download.
It's still a niche feature only partially built by a Horizon project (it was almost entirely built by commercial entities - MS and Mozilla) in a niche browser.
It's an indictment of the Horizon programme that this is considered the pre-eminent success story.
Its actually helped me a twice the last two weeks and I would browse mostly English language sites and I imagine it would be great if English wasn't your first language.
I didn't even know it was a new Firefox feature but I thought it was cool.
If the EU invests into research and development of a feature that a US tech company already offers (as a proprietary, closed-source service), it's needless duplication and a futile effort in catching up.
Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
> If the EU invests into research and development of a feature that a US tech company already offers (as a proprietary, closed-source service), it's needless duplication and a futile effort in catching up.
The example we're talking about is powered by a Marian, developed and open-sourced by a US multinational, Microsoft.
The Horizon project was to use that to create a Firefox plugin, which they did.
Another US multinational, Mozilla, later integrated into Firefox.
Firefox has 4.55% market share in Europe.
> Yet if it doesn't, that's admitting defeat in the face of competitors and the wrong move as well.
You are presenting a false and frankly bad faith dichotomy.
I believe to the order of millions of translations per day, but again, I don't remember where to view this, so might not be correct. But it's definitely orders of magnitude larger than 100s of users.
(And indeed, as a sibling comment points out, the feature is suggested to users in context, which of course massively helps with discoverability, so it's no surprise to me that it's used way more often than the extension.)
Can you, please, share a source for the claims you make about Marian? Specifically, "developed and open-sourced by a US multinational, Microsoft" and "funded by MS" (from two other comments by you)?
It does look like Microsoft is (was) funding the project, and employs one of the authors as head of research at Microsoft Translator, which is great, but all the "seed" funding and actual research happened in EU. Microsoft hired the author only in 2018 [1], while the earliest EU grant was allocated in 2015 [2], and the main paper they published says "it has mainly been developed at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and at the University of Edinburgh" [3].
Where did you get 7 languages from? It's like 30 right now, with new ones being added regularly.
What's unfinished about it?
And Marian also received 6 grants via Horizon, in cooperation with the exact same universities (the one in Edinburgh being the main one), so I'm not sure what's your point?
And did I try to list every success or one tangible example, as the parent asked?
The Horizon/Bergamot project ended with seven languages. Anything thereafter was added separately.
> What's unfinished about it?
The project ended with an unfinished implementation.
> And Marian was also funded by Horizon, also in cooperation with the exact same universities, so I'm not sure what's your point?
No, Marian was funded by MS.
You are revising history extraordinarily to make the most unimpressive project appear better than it was. If Bergamot achieved all its goals and was the exemplar of Horizon, Horizon would be a complete failure.
As it was, the project limped over the line unfinished to be picked up by Mozilla.
Huh? Most Firefox users presumably use it, and anyway it's obviously essential and extremely useful functionality.
And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
> Huh? Most Firefox users presumably use it, and anyway it's obviously essential and extremely useful functionality.
~~Only Firefox users who explicitly enable offline translation per langauge in Settings use this feature~~, which will be a tiny minority of users in a browser with a tiny (~2.5%) market share.
I'm wrong, the language packs now auto-download.
> And the really important languages for EU/US audiences are, in order, English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, which is, guess what, 7 languages...
Well, those weren't the seven languages supported by the Bergamot project when it ended. Only two of your seven were supported: Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Polish, and Spanish.
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.
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.
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!
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.