The company name “Autonomy” mean anything to you?
As I consolidate my formal writing I’m always referring back to my Pysbertron blog post archives from earlier, and forever surprising myself with things I’d written and forgotten. Given that’s 25 years of evolution not only in my writing but in any chance any current readers are likely to have read them, I’ve been tempted to start a series of reposts of ones I’d made earlier. Anyway, today I’m finally doing one … from November 2001, below
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QUOTE
Scoffing at Autonomy
From: CorporateInfo (TelegraphHillSF@yahoo.com)
Subject: Expert scoffs at Autonomy software
Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang
View: (This is the only article in this thread) | Original Format
Date: 2001-08-23 21:49:53 PST
At Genentech headquarters today in South San Francisco, there was a seminar on “Metadata & Controlled Vocabularies: What Are they and What is their Value?” given by Amy Warner, faculty member in Information Architecture at UMichigan, Genentech’s consultant on taxonomy creation and a well-known corporate consultant on information technology. Dr. Warner had a final slide with “Autonomy”and “Semio” written on it, and here’s what she said:
“I always get asked, aren’t there automated tools to build
taxonomies? There is some ‘Hiearchy Generation Software’ available, but it generally relies on the principal of Collocation, not
aboutness, which is preferable. Collocation simply means statistical
clustering. Two examples are Autonomy and Semio. Beware of these.
They don’t work very well. They make many promises, but Collocation only works some of the time. I shouldn’t bash, but I haven’t talked to a company yet that likes Autonomy, including those that have bought it. In many cases they are overselling their product.”
UNQUOTE
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[From an AI discussion group, 25 years ago, notice – but I digress.]
I only quote-posted this opinion about Autonomy at this point in 2001, just a month or so since I started my research and blogging “Psybertron” project, because we had formed very similar opinions in the day job, about how clueless and misguided Autonomy were when we were evaluating them for business-use sometime back in 1996/97. Their claims for their software were beyond marketing exaggeration – it did not do what it said on the tin – and frankly when quizzed they showed little understanding of how it was meant to work.
Fascinating how controversial – politically corrupt and immoral – they became in later years – you only had to ask 🙂 Remember their name … yet? Wikipedia is your friend.
In short they were sued, after acquisition by Hewlett Packard, for fraudulent accounting and overvaluation, “substantially” lost their civil case (the thick end of an $8bn dot-com-boom valuation), dragged Tories David Cameron and George Osborne into their scandal thanks to some dodgy Brexit-motivated dealings, and came to a sticky end when celebrating their acquittal on criminal charges in the US.
In August 2024, Lynch celebrated his acquittal in the San Francisco trial with a cruise on the family superyacht, Bayesian. He was joined by his wife and daughter and nine invited guests, including two lawyers from his defense team. In the early hours of 19 August, the yacht sank off the coast of Sicily, outside the port of Porticello, during a powerful storm, with 22 people on board.[62] Lynch, his teenage daughter Hannah, four guests, and one member of the crew died.[63] Chamberlain died one day later, on 20 August 2024, three days after he was hit by a car while out jogging in Stretham.[64]
Like I say – you only had to ask.
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Post Note (18 Nov 2025): And that disaster created by Autonomy in the 1990’s rumbles on in 2025:
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Post Note (May 2026): – the scope for “conspiracy theories” behind the accidental or deliberate sinking (and the other death) is huge with this one. (See the news story and Facebook comment threads behind links below.) Obviously it was an unusual boat probably failing to meet various design rules, but had operated safely for many years before, so exactly which operating procedures weren’t followed on that fateful stormy night, and why, are open to question. The Italian court found the crew liable – “Sinking of Irish-born billionaire’s superyacht was not due to storm“.
[Personally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Epstein / Thiel / Bannon / Farage / Trump connections behind it too, after all the corruption of UK politics around who benefitted from Brexit is the common nexus. And in case it’s not obvious, still relevant thanks to Thiel’s Palantir software being so embedded in current government arrangements. There’s no common technical or business heritage between the two systems, but there may be overlapping billionaire motivations and interests. As I say, easy to spin conspiracies, which I don’t believe in, except at abstract / conceptual levels removed from any objective facts.]
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PS: And in case it’s not obvious, given the relevance in all the still current AI / AGI / Real-Human-Conscious-Wilful-Intelligence debates, a beautiful irony in the name of the boat – chosen by Lynch after acquisition – “The Bayesian”. No?
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