The cancellation without explanation in the middle of the Christmas holidays of a million-dollar call for grants to research artificial intelligence (AI) has caused anger and commotion among hundreds of Spanish academics. “Personally, I have lost confidence that the State wants and can help AI research in this country,” says José Hernández-Orallo, professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València and researcher at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence in the University of Cambridge. “It doesn’t hold up anywhere, no one has seen something like this,” says Ulises Cortés, professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
The aid of 31 million euros was called in the summer of 2023 by the then Ministry of Universities of Joan Subirats. Hundreds of academics ran to coordinate during the holidays and present their best projects. In a few months they would know the results of an appeal of unprecedented magnitude. “At first everyone was surprised by the call, it was unusual with large projects, but very powerful consortia were created,” says Cortés.
But since spring 2024 there was only silence. At that time “it was known that there was a provisional list of beneficiaries and that the evaluation had concluded,” says Alfonso Ureña, professor at the University of Jaén. The silence lasted until almost the last day of the year. On December 30, the Ministry of Science, now in charge of Universities, sent a letter to the applicants: “unforeseen circumstances” made it “not technically possible to resolve this call.” The message also cited the “need to prioritize” resources for the Valencian dana in October. Orallo, a professor in Valencia, believes that it is “a miserable excuse, perhaps because it could be illegal to cancel such a call without a force majeure reason and they have taken advantage of a calamity, it is shameful.” “Not only do they cancel it, but transparency, as a public administration, is zero,” he adds.
The pretext of the dana generates many doubts among academics, especially considering the dates. On March 22, 2024, Alejandro Rodríguez González, professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, received an email telling him that the projects had already been evaluated. “I’m not saying that the funds are not going to be allocated to the dana, that it would have to be proven, but that this call was already mortally wounded before the dana, it seems like a fact,” says Rodríguez González.
The moment in which the Ministry of Science stopped responding gives a clue as to what could have happened. Some statements from the Government pointed to changes in the General Secretariat of Universities as a possible factor in the delays in this call. That change was in May 2024, when the Secretary of Universities, José Manuel Pingarrón, who had been in office since 2018 and who had survived three ministers, left. Pingarrón was never in the trusted circle of the Minister of Science, Diana Morant, and had been losing powers since a Secretary of State for Science and Universities, Juan Cruz Cigudosa, was placed above him.
“It is a call that came from a previous Ministry and did not fit with the policy they wanted to advocate now,” says Cortés. “I don’t think it has to do with dana, it was evaluated long before the summer,” he adds. Academics are concerned that neither the evaluations nor the supposed beneficiaries have been published. A group of affected people has gathered to collect signatures collectively. Its first demand is precisely “the publication of the results of the evaluations of our projects and the provisional and final resolution of the beneficiary projects.” For Cortés, these legal details prove the precision and complexity with which the decision has been assessed: “There has been a team of lawyers who have defended the interests of the State and when lawyers have to come in to explain a political decision, well, you already know.” .
Promise of new call
The 31 million of this plan came from European funds and were part of the National AI Strategy, which is part of the Spanish Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. Asked by this newspaper, a spokesperson for the Ministry says that these 31 million are also included “in the framework of the National Strategy of the Government of Spain, in which different management instruments are proposed” and that for that reason “the money will be allocated and we will inform you appropriately when we do so.” Regarding the promise of a new call in the future, no details are given: “The Ministry’s commitment is that, in the shortest possible time, a new call will be prepared in 2025, which on this occasion will be managed by the State Research Agency.” .
It is also not clear whether the same proposals will be used or whether the financing will be the same: they only add that “it will respond to the scientific objectives that inspired the initial call, with a financial envelope and a design that facilitates and ensures its execution.” Regarding the reasons for the cancellation of the call, they do not give any further clues: “We deeply regret that the proposals presented will not be able to be carried out under this call, and in this sense we want to point out that in no case is its cancellation related to the scientific assessment. of the proposals,” says this Ministry spokesperson.
There are academics who are not very willing to wait for new calls from the Spanish Government, like Hernández Orallo: “I don’t know what others will do and we have not discussed it among the participants in my network. In my case, I don’t think I will ask for anything in Spain again as a principal investigator, and I am thinking about going to do research abroad. For me it is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says.
Cortés has already accumulated two problematic calls, but he does not lose hope of participating to promote the Spanish community. “The previous AI call in which we participated was issued by Carme Artigas [ex secretaria de Estado de Digitalización e IA] and it was the most horrible bureaucratic thing I have ever been in in my life and now it is, but what I can’t stop doing is trying to participate in the national calls because they create a community, it will be more difficult for them to deceive you and we will think about it, but we will have to be there,” explains Cortés.
This feeling of uncertainty may be a problem in future calls for government aid. “People are already going to be afraid of working on something like this again given the uncertainty that this cancellation has generated,” says Ureña. “In my 35-year research career I have never attended a call that has been cancelled,” he adds.
Other academics still prefer to maintain their anonymity due to lack of job stability at a public university or for fear of other means of punishment that the administration could use. “It’s nonsense,” says a professor who prefers not to give his name. “The most important thing is not the time lost, but rather that we have lost the illusion of thinking that the Ministry wanted to promote AI, and let’s not fool ourselves, if the Spanish university does not take significant steps in R&D in AI, Spain will not give them,” he adds.
Excess bureaucracy
The call was specifically to promote the use of AI in different disciplines and asked that professors from universities and complementary subjects join in, which complicated the request. “Our group wanted to evaluate the impact and applicability of new ChatGPT-type systems in biomedical environments,” says Rodríguez González. But the need to adjust academics from different universities turned the call into a labyrinth of bureaucracy, according to those affected. “With the hyper-bureaucratized Spanish calls, 20% is required for ideas and 80% for everything else (you fill out forms, budgets, letters justifying nonsense, authorizations, requirements). They even forced us to have a signed inter-university agreement for the allegations, which involves legal services from several universities,” says Hernández-Orallo.
One of the researchers consulted who prefers to remain anonymous adds that the precedent is terrible: “With what confidence are we now going to request other research projects if we know that they can even cancel calls after months of delay? This opens a critical gap in the Spanish science system. I know that there are prestigious scientists who, upon seeing what they have done, have decided never to request projects again. It is horrible for Spanish science.”
The damage that this cancellation does to the cutting-edge work with artificial intelligence that was being done in some centers will lead many to rethink their future work and the hiring of outside talent. “Compared to other countries around us, in Spain there has been a lot of commission, a lot of planning and a lot of posturing, but little help for research and companies in the area of artificial intelligence,” says Hernández Orallo. “We are going to lose competitiveness, especially to retain talent, it will be an important brake on research,” adds Ureña.
This talent has names and surnames whose work future will also be affected by the lack of funding that the centers already provided for. “We have all had to adapt the development of our academic career to the objectives of this project,” says a researcher who chooses not to give his name. “Our research was paralyzed and we do not know how to continue, because the regular calls of the Spanish Research Agency are not so well funded. These projects, worth up to 2 million each, represented a great leap in quality in AI research and allowed us to compete with the most powerful groups worldwide.”
One of the objectives of this call was precisely “to attract relevant intellectual leaders to open scientific challenges in AI in order to explore technical, social and scientific barriers.” The end result is, apparently, the opposite.
