[DrScientist]

DeepMind - the company owned by Google, but behind things like AlphaFold is based on London. And one of the fathers of modern AI - leading the resurgence of research into neural nets - Geoffrey Hinton is British-Canadian.

He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded.

So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is.

Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.

[h8hawk]

Hinton is not the "father of modern AI." This overlooks the contributions of many others.

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...

[DrScientist]

Sure the ideas go away away back - but most people had given up on neural nets after the initial excitement, and sure others were also working on it - however the difference for me is he used it to solve real world interesting problems - and by showing what was possible - that ignited the resurgence.

Now you could argue that the people in the 60's and 70's didn't have the compute available to make non-toy networks, and it was only applying the same techniques on bigger datasets with more compute that was the real difference.

Sure - but that happens all the time in science - every innovation is building on the shoulders of others and the assignment of the Nobel prize is as a result often rather arbitrary.

Also don't underestimate the value of reducing to practice - the difference between coming up with an idea and actually making it work in practice.

[kelipso]

I wouldn't discount the issue of intellectual capital. There are just a handful of universities in the UK that produce world class level work in CS. While there are dozens of such universities in the US. Numbers like that make a big difference.

And if I remember correctly, PhDs in the UK are kind of weird compared to the US. Your thesis has to be research that you haven't published yet.

[rcarmo]

Well, they were completely right in studying history, but maybe they should have studied better economics too.

[DrScientist]

The most common degree for UK politicians is PPE - politics, philosophy and economics.

I'm not sure the problem is an understanding of economics, it's an understanding of how the real world works, and how to make it better - they are often too easily swayed by big lobby groups with vested interests.

[rcarmo]

Well, at least we have more lawyers in the EU…

[DrScientist]

Law is also pretty common in the UK - though behind the accountants.

Science and engineering isn't even a category for occupational background of UK MPs in the following report.

https://www.smith-institute.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/1...