Difference to CERN would be that no company is financing high energy physics while AI is frenzily funded.
But getting new models and insights (in the public domain) is a good idea.
Unfortunately, EU research money nowadays is free money for private companies. How this works: a 3-year research project with a consortium of academia+industry of 2-3 universities (1M/each) and 4-5 private companies(50k-200k).
With this money, universities do fund PhD students but with a stipend/salary of an average software engineer. In contrast, the "industry partners" do the bare minimum work a couple of days before the quarterly review. And they use 20% of that money to sub-contract their work packages to freelancers (who, btw are paid better than the PhD students) and the other 80% to cover normal OpEx.
And you know... the "work packages" can be something like 5K-10K for a bootstrap/hugo website.
Edit: yes, I over-simplify things a lot but that's the general modus operandi.
There already is the infra for a 'CERN for AI' - it's called CERN.
CERN is already a major leader in the HPC space, but whereas HPC and High Energy Physics labs like LLBL, ANL, NSC Guangzhou already pivoted to ML and precision medicine research in the 2010s, CERN member states weren't nimble enough to support additional pivots within CERN.
Not so fast, not so fast - at first whole, brand new bureaucratic department (or two) needs to be created to properly govern whole process, when that is ready then work on regulations framework can be started - there is one already but for sure that cannot be sufficient enough because every corner case needs to be properly accounted for. Do no forget about required government overlook, registrations, permissions for future usages of this dangerous new tech, all needs to be in place.
CERN is a special place, unless there is support to build a similar institution, it won't happen.
By the way, CERN is already exploring AI for the new accelerator.
If you want a CERN for AI you need to build a fab for affordable graphics cards with good software support and high vram.
Haven't they changed their Name to NERDS recently? ;)
https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-change-name-70th-anniv...
> The efforts should focus not only on physical and life sciences, but also on humanities and social sciences
:)
> and they should ensure that AI systems are aligned with “European values”, the scientific advisors say.
:(
Something like this would really need to be coupled with creating much more viable markets for investment in AI (and associated technology) in Europe.
Large-scale R&D could be great, but applications of that research should have a good opportunity for creating wealth in Europe.
That may be useful if paired with a comprehensive industrial policy to boost the domestic semiconductor industry. Otherwise it'd just be a funnel to American companies for EU taxpayers' money.
How much bigger is CERN than other circular accelerators?
How big would a "AI CERN" server farm need to be relative to the biggest ones in the world?
Will it be able to generate an image of the most common misspelling of the large hadron collider?
It'd be amazing to have an institute for publishing completely open models and weights - especially now the Biden administration seems to be going full AI doomer against Open Source models and weights with the recent US AI Safety Institute appointment.
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I should be for this, because this is how I make my living in the most literal sense.
But to be honest, I am dismayed with how the ecosystem works in the EU. Billions upon billions of funding for research, some of it good and (let's face it) a lot of it not so good. But either way, no commercialization will result out of all this fundamental research. Any commercialisable results will be spun into startups in the US and China decades before any EU entity follows their path. The many scientists trained with this funding; many of them will end up in the US, and maybe of them will end up in European companies, but not in any position that would make them use any of their acquired skills.
At a time when the EU economy is falling behind so evidently, I'm frustrated that we have these people in power proposing the same old paradigms that don't really benefit the continent.