This is part of the "identity crisis"?
It's the communist form of a company and shares similar failures. IMO we're better off just not having them for the most part.
I agree that it is difficult to align incentives for non-profits, but turning them into companies would simply add a profit motive and an obligation to shareholders on top of those difficult-to-align incentives.
The people that non-profits are accountable to (the poor, minorities, etc) are generally powerless vis-à-vis those non-profits, and there is a perpetual risk of corruption arising from that effective lack of accountability. The paying customers of a business are relatively much more powerful vis-à-vis that business. If Gmail upsets you, you switch to Fastmail; if your soup kitchen upsets you, you... what? Don't eat?
This stuff is very, very hard, and something I'm sceptical will ever be solved, least of all here on HN.
In the UK, poor people can afford food that's sold at a profit. They're given free money.
I understand your argument, but in practice SF would benefit from these shutting down.
At a minimum they shouldn’t be tax payer funded. Even philanthropic non-profits are often funded by children (or spouses) via inherited wealth from the people that actually built things. This then funds actively harmful policy and orgs because the people throwing money around have no idea how to achieve what they want and there is a class of specialized NGO vultures that go after the money while accomplishing nothing.
This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.
Yes, that's why FAANG keeps losing employees to soup kitchens. The fabulous pay.
> This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.
Real issues. I don't think I ever said that non-profits work well; they don't. My problem is with the idea that there's some simple alternative that we could whip up in VS Code, some clever business structure that somehow makes the organisation immune from basic incentives.
Non-profits become bloated and ineffective in exactly the same way as monopolies, and for exactly the same reason - their 'customers' are powerless against them. This is a fundamental issue of power relations, not something someone designed to work this way because they thought starting a soup kitchen is a great get-rich-quick scheme (in the Bay Area, no less. No other way to get rich quick there!).
There's an incredible amount of naïveté in tech criticism of non-profits, and people who end up hurt by that are people in need.
I think non-profits are accountable to their donors but the problem with charity is that the donors are giving money mostly to be seen to give money. They rarely care much about outcomes. Indeed if the non-profit actually solved the problem they were set up to tackle the donors would have a problem as now they'd need to find a new cause to demonstrate their philanthropic loveliness with.
And yeah one can argue that feeding poor people is of little value; that's the whole idea behind the parable of teaching a man to fish. Translated into modern terms, the right thing to do in terms of value creation is make poor people richer, not give them free food. Then they can feed themselves and much more. It's of course a harder problem but much more valuable to solve.
They're not, in any effective way. Re-read my post. All attempts to make non-profits accountable to someone else - government, donors - are an attempt to work around the fact that the only real stakeholders in a soup kitchen are completely powerless, and wouldn't it be nice if someone powerful could exert accountability? It would! And yet it doesn't seem to work in practice, perhaps because the homeless' interest is in soup, and the donor's interest is in plaques with their names on them, and the two aren't the same thing. It's often donor pressures that reduce non-profit effectiveness.
> And yeah one can argue that feeding poor people is of little value; that's the whole idea behind the parable of teaching a man to fish. Translated into modern terms, the right thing to do in terms of value creation is make poor people richer, not give them free food. Then they can feed themselves and much more. It's of course a harder problem but much more valuable to solve.
It is obvious to the point of complete absurdity that making poor people richer would alleviate poverty. Meanwhile, while you work on the small, pesky matter of solving poverty, people are hungry right now. Are you proposing we shut down soup kitchens until your plucky effort to solve all poverty succeeds? Because if you're not, we're back to where we started.
Posts are like these are precisely why HN isn't solving poverty. "Wouldn't it be nice if the poor weren't poor? Maybe we should teach them how not to be poor? That's surely never been tried before."
In a world with unlimited time and resources, obviously we'd want to do both soup kitchens and other anti-poverty initiatives, but opportunity costs are real. There's limited resources, time and attention to go around. The people spending money on soup kitchens aren't spending money on other things.
In most societies there's a lot of low hanging fruit for reducing (absolute) poverty. Lots of things we know work well to create wealth and reduce poverty get ignored. For example, maybe if taxes were lower fewer soup kitchens would get funded, but fewer people would find themselves needing them to begin with - a win. We know that small state libertarianism creates wealth, so initiatives to address poverty often end up creating the issues they're trying to solve.
Given that, if you have three people and limited time/money, is it better to run a soup kitchen or lobby against poverty-creating government policies? You can't necessarily do both.
Substitute "run education schemes" for lobbying if you prefer. Same tradeoffs apply.
That's fair. I wrote the post quickly, wanted to avoid words like 'stakeholder' and ended up inadvertently overloading the word 'accountable'. What I meant to say is that a soup kitchen is effectively in a monopoly position vis-à-vis its 'customers', its 'customers' are largely powerless against it, and that creates bad incentives. Trying to engineer clever business structures for the soup kitchen does not remove said incentives.
> (tail)
I am very sympathetic to both libertarianism and soup kitchens, so I'm going to be a somewhat idiosyncratic defender of the latter, but I think the moral hazard argument against charity is a relatively weak one. In reality, people in need of aid divide largely into two groups: (a) people in temporary straits, often through external factors (e.g. fleeing an abusive relationship with nothing but the shirts on their backs), and (b) people with persistent mental health issues. Neither are really groups who would benefit from education on how not to be poor - it would be patronising to the former and wasted on the latter. There is widespread societal consensus that people in situations such as the above probably shouldn't starve to death, which I would posit is a good thing.
'our [UK?] international leadership in AI' -> citation needed?
Notable well-known things from DeepMind are AlphaGo (the first time a computer beat a world champion at Go), AlphaFold (resulting in a Nobel prize). Gemini (LLM, a variant of which is used in Google search results) and Gemma (open-weights LLMs).
They were acquired by Google, so you could argue they aren't centred in the UK any more, but I still think they qualify as international leadership in AI coming from the UK.
They've been acquired. There's nothing left to argue.
I was reading earlier today about how Kuka AG, the German mechanical engineering company, was sold to a Chinese investor in 2016. A fascinating story:
This. It’s also nigh impossible for new visionaries to succeed in an organization because of that self-preservation of the existing ruling political class. Visionaries show loyalty to the org, not the people, and that makes them a prime target for harassment and cuts as a result.
Smart orgs keep visionaries in charge, but accountable.
There are always good reasons for why X law or Y regulation exists or why Z company is given preferences and even subsidies. But the visionaries are undermined all the same.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Unfortunately the opposite is also true, as anyone who's served on a non-profit board with noncommital members knows.
I think a reasonable compromise would be to elect a top 2-3 and then choose randomly between them.
Funny, we have similar views about Google search[1], and those days were much better
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940485
[1] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4...
> This is part of an overhaul dubbed Turing 2.0 under which the institute will focus on three key areas: health, the environment, and defence and security.
They're trying to make the organization into a defense subcontractor (with a few side-projects for image maintenance), and purging anyone who isn't interested in that mission.
A lot of academic researchers who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere ended up there.
The org is fundamentally dysfunctional according to an insider I spoke to. They blamed leadership.
They should have isolated it from academia - no hires from universities allowed, only hiring people who had previously worked in industry for the last few years.
Now this may be difficult in the UK because all jobs pay two quid a year, you have to live in a closet somewhere with a name like Pennyfarthing-upon-Longbottoms, and you can't get air conditioning without permission from the king.
Also seeded with NSA talent, with a founder who worked in academia and codebreaking, just to make your comment even more relevant.
Those are the people behind the core innovations that made Google so powerful: PageRank, MapReduce, BigTable, the indexing pipeline, protobufs/Stubby, GFS, AdWords, AdSense and the use of ML in both (iirc Veach was a key reason the ads system worked so well).
So none of the names I associate with early Google were academics. They all came from industry.
The UK is doing the same thing to queer people today; all the while pretending like they're enlightened because they slapped their victims names on their institutions.
What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute? (April 2024): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43493313
And trying to read the article - the narcissistic Dilbert-speak never stops.
Theory: The ATI was founded purely as an exercise in pretentious political posturing. And even on Day 1, it was so badly infested with self-serving third-raters that there never was any chance of it succeeding.
Looks like activists pushing DEI have infiltrated this organisation, like many others in the UK.
If you change the sex and it becomes a sexist statement, it was always a sexist statement.
Why did they have projects in those areas at all?
But actually fixing them would require hard decisions.
So our government wants to look like it is frantically working to achieve these things (fix our housing crisis etc). But absolutely not making the changes needed.
So they announce things like the Turing institute to look busy. Then dump weird requirements on it to look like they’re doing things. Then defund it (because it was never meant to be a real thing, just a donkey to pin press releases on).
See also the “Spaceports” we built, our “massive breakthroughs” in fusion energy and SMRs, Heathrow extension etc…
These are not serious people interested in cutting edge AI research.
nemomarx•5mo ago
sobiolite•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
Q: Is the HQ nominally being in London at all relevant given it was acquired by Alphabet/Google? I'm sure the accountants have the tax status all sorted by now...
eab-•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
vouwfietsman•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
I was responding to the quote from Dame Wendy Hall claiming that that UK [has] "international leadership in AI"
cma•5mo ago
LeifCarrotson•5mo ago
However, Apple (headquartered in the US) loves to issue press releases describing how their products are "Designed by Apple in California[, USA]" even though a lot of work in the manufacturing, the software, and the design of subcomponents (or major components, I don't know how Apple is organized internally) are done in China, India and Vietnam as you listed.
I'd argue that in the same way that Shenzen and Zhengzhou are leaders in electronics assembly because the bulk of the iPhone and other products are built there, regardless of the location of the headquarters of Apple, so to can London claim to be a leader in AI because the researchers for DeepMind are located in London, regardless of who owns the DeepMind brand.
Buying a thing from another country doesn't make your location a leader in that thing.
logifail•5mo ago
The UK wasn't claiming to be "leaders _in manufacturing_", they were claiming "international leadership in AI".
As I said elsewhere in the thread, citation needed...
atq2119•5mo ago
astrange•5mo ago
firefax•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
Would it be unfair to ask if (in this instance the UK's) satellite country taxpayers are subsidising corporate offices when the overall structures are arranged such that any overall corporation tax payable will be paid in the lowest-possible jurisdiction?
See - for instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...
shkkmo•5mo ago
logifail•5mo ago
See also https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/deepmind/2019-d...
"As part of a wider group reorganisation, the Company distributed intellectual property assets which had a nil book value to another group undertaking on 31 October 2019."
Honestly, claiming DeepMind is still some scrappy London-based startup is quite unfortunate :/
homefree•5mo ago
I attribute it mostly to a cultural problem and I don't think they can fix their politics from the downward spiral they're on. It's why they have a number that rounds to zero of billion dollar software companies and why all their ambitious people do their best to get to the US.
klelatti•5mo ago
> so the work is, in practical and legal senses, U.S.-based...
These two statements literally contradict each other in both cases.
logifail•5mo ago
Welcome to how multinational corporate entities structure their tax affairs!
You might like to start by reading
https://taxjustice.net/2024/11/06/corporate-tax-haven-index-...
although there are many others....
klelatti•5mo ago
I don't agree with the statement that you're challenging but Google DeepMind's operations in London make it (still) an important centre for AI research and is probably why the UK is ranked third on many international AI country rankings.
shkkmo•5mo ago
Since I didn't do that, I'm not sure how that is relevant or productive.
> work is, in practical and legal senses, U.S.-based...
This seems factually false. The work happening there has to comply with UK laws, not US laws and the practical locus of researchers located there provides a pool of talent that makes it a better place to do an AI startup than places that lack it.
The point is that London is enough of a research hub in AI for it to be worth maintaining a significant research presence there and to even make researchers interested in relocating there.
DeepMind is obviously foriegn owned and controlled now, which does limit the UK's ability to exert control of and profit from it. That only makes weakening the institutions they do control, like ATI, more significant.
rhubarbtree•5mo ago
DeepMind obviously, but also top ranking universities working on AI like Edinburgh and Oxbridge.
The US is five times larger than the UK, so no it’s not likely to be comparable. But the UK is up there.