The Blue Brain Project belongs to EPFL and is entirely funded internally; it's about 2% of EPFL's budget.

I'm not qualified to speak of the science behind the HBP but I know that a few labs in China and in the US (like the Allen institute) see some value in it. It's a big engineering project and maybe the end goal and result isn't what's important here. Pretty much like CERN.

> Best example is that big blue brain project in Switzerland that got billions even when the science was not there.

It's the Human Brain Project, and it's 1 billion over 10 years. It is currently in year 7, and at the end, it will provide the AWS of neuroscience in Europe.

Seems like they built a wonderful machine for answering "42":

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten-year...

Or will build, if they are granted the additional money they ask for past 2023: “The development of high-quality brain simulators requires a long-term commitment of resources”. We shall call it Deep Thought: the sunk-cost brain.

the project is actually in 3 stages, the first 2 dubious, the one which just started in April is worth reconsidering, see my sibling comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24605138

I think it will utterly fail. Some interesting spin-offs may still happen but the whole project is a great exercise in marketing, not so much in science.

It's easy to write off as a failure, as doing so requires little to no engagement with the internal structure and struggle of the project, which is the largest in informatics and neuroscience that I am aware of. If you don't agree, please cite something else on the same scale.

I'm involved with HBP and other non-European and European national neuroscience projects (though I am neutral here, just a university-employed engineer), and the science in the recent phase (starting in April this year) is a complete break with preceding funding phase and on-par with other projects. The people leading the science subproject are actually leading PIs on the topics. For comparison, let's name Allen Institute, though Allen is more a monolith, whereas HBP is more like micro-services, with a high cost in coordination, but now a focus on "FAIR" aspects like open-ness and reusability.

The infrastructure side is also coming along, and will provide an AWS of neuroscience (6 national HPC sites, multi-zone OpenStack/OpenShift, 2 neuro-morphic platforms, neuro-robotics platform, federated IAM, metadata and object storage stack, dedicated clinical infrastructure, etc) , but the failure or success will depend a lot more on the larger community getting convinced to engage their workflows on the platform. If people collectively agree that it isn't worth using, then the infrastructure teams never get to justify the whole thing, and it will flop. In that sense, the marketing aspect is not a facade, but a necessary condition for HBP to become a EU RI.

Of course I have no chickens in the fight; if it flops I can keep writing my shitty works-on-my-computer codes for one off unreproducible research projects.

This is roughly where I stopped believing this was a serious project:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090904071908.h...

To make that claim in 2009 was complete and utter bullshit, if you've sold your project on grandiose claims like that then I don't think you are into science.

The claim is clearly idiotic, and none of scientists I work with consider it requiring rebuttal. That’s also 11 years ago, same year Python 2.7 was first released. Markram isn’t in HBP since... 4 years and I think what we have in the final phase now is the people trying to turn lemons into lemonade.

Maybe my problem is that I don’t see myself as “believing” in the project or not: it’s easier to learn from failure in fact. If the whole thing fails, it will make the EU a little more cautious about the next potential flagship project. Which is presumably what all the FUD surrounding HBP is about.

It could easily cause a kind of AI winter just when there actually is progress in the field.

The EU should have insisted on believable deliverables. At the time I was highly critical about the claim, it being 11 years ago doesn't really matter to me, it was obvious that you could not extrapolate from the state of the art+a relatively limited amount of time to such a game changing deliverable (essentially: general AI).

I sincerely hope that you will be able to come up with enough results worth applying somewhere in real-life projects and products that in the end it will all be worth it. Best of luck to you.

The winter is a good point, and it’s true there is a lot of overpromising even given the funding. We’ll see..