5 ms·

EU science advisers back call for a 'CERN for AI' to aid research

ano-ther 2y ago
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.
- loufe 2y ago
  Great point. I think the next couple years will see private money dry up for all but a few companies, unless there are further massive breakthroughs. A publically funded group would be great to incubate talent in the EU and help keep AI research free and open.
- mrd3v0 2y ago
  Yeah, it will be interesting to see how they are going to avoid an "OpenAI" situation.
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  Yes, but just as you need commercial stuff you also need research, and those are different things. I think something like this will be great. It'll be fantastic to go there for a conference, it'll be fantastic to work there for two years even if you eventually go into industry, etc. I think the problem for commercialisation is the cost of DL accelerators and I think this is what creates the enormous VC reliance, and this in turn leads to many firms being in the US. The EU probably needs some effort to bring DL accelerators closer to the semiconductor production cost-- it shouldn't be 40x what TSMC charges to make the chips, it should be maybe 2x or 3x. I don't know if that's realistic, but considering that chips are so expensive that the electricity costs aren't a big fraction of the cost anymore, I think even badly designed chips, if you get them cheaply, will do. I think there should be a centralised location though, or well two. One for summer and one for winter, one here in Sweden, the other in Southern France or in Spain.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Didn't big hospitals start to get their own accelerators ? (Or what do you mean by "DL"-oh, Deep Learning, my bad, in context I thought it was something like Direct Linear particle accelerators...)
- mrtksn 2y ago
  See, the AI funding frenzy is about extracting much more money from it in the future. IMHO it's like the 2000s internet when everything was funded by the VC and the internet was amazing, only to turn into this money extraction racket of a few apps and websites dominating %90 of everything with no fun left. They banked on rent seeking by locking down everything, to the point that nothing new is being made in SV anymore and the only new big thing in that space came from China(TikTok) and Russia(Telegram). Would suck badly if the people who fund the current AI revolution decide that it's time to recoup their investment. It's not that they are bad people, it's just that they are not doing it as a charity. Also, OpenAI's rationalisation for switching from non-profit to for-profit revolves around the idea that AI research is very expensive because it requires huge amount of hardware and it's not feasible to raise the required capital for this as a non-profit. There's the solution for OpenAI becoming open: CERN for AI. Money is provided with expectation of open research.
- toxik 2y ago
  That is because nobody expects HEP to produce commercially viable products. People do expect that of AI. I think it sounds like a great idea, both to stop a bit of AI brain drain to the US, as well as to develop AI for things that aren't immediately profitable to businesses.
  - arethuza 2y ago
    Well, nobody expected it, but by funding HEP we got the Web.
  - bluish29 2y ago
    That's a very good reason why CERN produced a lot of things that lead to many viable products at the end. The R&D work is usually a rich source of knowledge in itself.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > no company is financing high energy physics Medical Technology (eg. Siemens Healthcare, GE Healthcare, Abbott, Medtronics, Phillips) all sponsor high energy physics due to it's applications in medical imaging and some nuclear therapies. HPC firms like Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Huawei, etc are also major hirers due to the applications of simulations in machine learning (and vice versa). Most ML innovations were sparked out of research that arose from nuclear simulation research after the NTBT was enforced. And finally, ML R&D companies themselves have funded research in adjacent spaces of High Energy Physics that also had concurrent applications in the ML space. The issue with CERN (and much of Europe's R&D ecosystem) is organizational.
GardenLetter27 2y ago
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.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  > Biden administration seems to be going full AI doomer against Open Source models and weights with the recent US AI Safety Institute appointment. I haven't been following the US scene, can you elaborate? The last time I looked, tech celebrities like Paul Graham and Alex Karp were dissing Europe for regulating AI saying that Europe will miss out on AI. Did the USA regulate the AI too?
  - dartos 2y ago
    Just a lot of talk. https://ai.gov/ https://ai.gov/ IIRC big tech companies an OpenAI are lobbying to make making foundational models very hard for non big tech companies.
  - GardenLetter27 2y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/feds-appoint-ai-doomer-to-run-us-ai-safety-institute/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/feds-appoint-ai-...
- oefrha 2y ago
  While some regulations might be beneficial, it’s sad that the opinion of an 80-year-old on nascent technology carries so much weight…
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Will it be able to generate an image of the most common misspelling of the large hadron collider?
- ben_w 2y ago
  Almost certainly as we don't have the same fear of our own bodies this side of the Atlantic, e.g. spinning advert cube near my apartment has "Dildo King" on one face.
pjmlp 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mytailorisrich 2y ago
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.
- sofixa 2y ago
  That industrial policy is already here: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-chips-act_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    I should have added "effective" policy, then ;)
RandomLensman 2y ago
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.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  With the viable markets you wouldn't need nearly so much investment. People can make money from this; they'll invest.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    Yes, but unless you fear state funding crowding out public funding, having some state sponsored research doesn't strike me as wrong (could be more basic science, different directions, etc.) - even if there is great investment market.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      I don't fear it; I just don't think it's necessary. Just as I don't fear state funded lawnmower manufacturing.
      - RandomLensman 2y ago
        If Europe wants to finally put the Capital Markets Union and some associated bits in place properly it might indeed not be needed. More defense spending in Europe is probably also creating some new funding opportunities.
RecycledEle 2y ago
[flagged]
goethes_kind 2y ago
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.
- krageon 2y ago
  While your comment on the bureaucracy of the EU is reasonable and realistic, the comment on the use (or lack of it) of most science has very little to do with Europe. I've spent literal years implementing the newest natural language processing papers in practice and over 90% of them cannot be replicated or are replicable but the results are fabrications (generally statistical lies or other types of misrepresentation). The text of the paper is almost never in line with the actual numbers and the numbers are not in line with reality. Perhaps ironically I did feel like I was right to leave the academic world. I wouldn't like to professionally wade through the intellectual equivalent of shit for decades on end. A few years were more than enough.
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    My field is different, but as someone from the industry side that keeps up with our counterpart in academia....most of what is being published is worthless. It serves no purpose other than to inflate publishing statistics. It has a lot of relevant keywords, but nothing I can actually use in industry to solve the problem the paper reports to. For example, there will be a paper on how to fix X and I'll get really excited, but then realize that the idea shows that the person fundamentally doesn't understand the field and then they'll apply some obscure algorithm that is vastly inferior to the state of the art 20 years ago on a tiny model and then claim success.
ctrw 2y ago
If you want a CERN for AI you need to build a fab for affordable graphics cards with good software support and high vram.
- spiderfarmer 2y ago
  Or you tackle a commercially interesting problem first and fund the research to tape out more efficient chips in cooperation with ASML and NXP.
Almondsetat 2y ago
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?
- orbifold 2y ago
  It cost 6 billion to build the current collider (in an existing tunnel) and CERN has a budget of 1-2 billion per year. In terms of data they are easily producing 100x of previous colliders.
mistermann 2y ago
> 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. :(
groestl 2y ago
Haven't they changed their Name to NERDS recently? ;) https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-change-name-70th-anniversary https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-change-name-70th-anniv...
alephnerd 2y ago
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.
fforflo 2y ago
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.
- kmmlng 2y ago
  I'm not sure how it is for the companies, but as universities involved in EU projects, the amount of bureaucracy is just overwhelming and there are so many nonsensical requirements, that you don't get to do any interesting work. Overall, it barely seems worth it.
pxtail 2y ago
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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

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.

loufe 2y ago
Great point. I think the next couple years will see private money dry up for all but a few companies, unless there are further massive breakthroughs. A publically funded group would be great to incubate talent in the EU and help keep AI research free and open.
mrd3v0 2y ago
Yeah, it will be interesting to see how they are going to avoid an "OpenAI" situation.
impossiblefork 2y ago
Yes, but just as you need commercial stuff you also need research, and those are different things. I think something like this will be great. It'll be fantastic to go there for a conference, it'll be fantastic to work there for two years even if you eventually go into industry, etc. I think the problem for commercialisation is the cost of DL accelerators and I think this is what creates the enormous VC reliance, and this in turn leads to many firms being in the US. The EU probably needs some effort to bring DL accelerators closer to the semiconductor production cost-- it shouldn't be 40x what TSMC charges to make the chips, it should be maybe 2x or 3x. I don't know if that's realistic, but considering that chips are so expensive that the electricity costs aren't a big fraction of the cost anymore, I think even badly designed chips, if you get them cheaply, will do. I think there should be a centralised location though, or well two. One for summer and one for winter, one here in Sweden, the other in Southern France or in Spain.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Didn't big hospitals start to get their own accelerators ? (Or what do you mean by "DL"-oh, Deep Learning, my bad, in context I thought it was something like Direct Linear particle accelerators...)
mrtksn 2y ago
See, the AI funding frenzy is about extracting much more money from it in the future. IMHO it's like the 2000s internet when everything was funded by the VC and the internet was amazing, only to turn into this money extraction racket of a few apps and websites dominating %90 of everything with no fun left. They banked on rent seeking by locking down everything, to the point that nothing new is being made in SV anymore and the only new big thing in that space came from China(TikTok) and Russia(Telegram). Would suck badly if the people who fund the current AI revolution decide that it's time to recoup their investment. It's not that they are bad people, it's just that they are not doing it as a charity. Also, OpenAI's rationalisation for switching from non-profit to for-profit revolves around the idea that AI research is very expensive because it requires huge amount of hardware and it's not feasible to raise the required capital for this as a non-profit. There's the solution for OpenAI becoming open: CERN for AI. Money is provided with expectation of open research.
toxik 2y ago
That is because nobody expects HEP to produce commercially viable products. People do expect that of AI. I think it sounds like a great idea, both to stop a bit of AI brain drain to the US, as well as to develop AI for things that aren't immediately profitable to businesses.
- arethuza 2y ago
  Well, nobody expected it, but by funding HEP we got the Web.
- bluish29 2y ago
  That's a very good reason why CERN produced a lot of things that lead to many viable products at the end. The R&D work is usually a rich source of knowledge in itself.
alephnerd 2y ago
> no company is financing high energy physics Medical Technology (eg. Siemens Healthcare, GE Healthcare, Abbott, Medtronics, Phillips) all sponsor high energy physics due to it's applications in medical imaging and some nuclear therapies. HPC firms like Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Huawei, etc are also major hirers due to the applications of simulations in machine learning (and vice versa). Most ML innovations were sparked out of research that arose from nuclear simulation research after the NTBT was enforced. And finally, ML R&D companies themselves have funded research in adjacent spaces of High Energy Physics that also had concurrent applications in the ML space. The issue with CERN (and much of Europe's R&D ecosystem) is organizational.

GardenLetter27 2y ago

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.

mrtksn 2y ago
> Biden administration seems to be going full AI doomer against Open Source models and weights with the recent US AI Safety Institute appointment. I haven't been following the US scene, can you elaborate? The last time I looked, tech celebrities like Paul Graham and Alex Karp were dissing Europe for regulating AI saying that Europe will miss out on AI. Did the USA regulate the AI too?
- dartos 2y ago
  Just a lot of talk. https://ai.gov/ https://ai.gov/ IIRC big tech companies an OpenAI are lobbying to make making foundational models very hard for non big tech companies.
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/feds-appoint-ai-doomer-to-run-us-ai-safety-institute/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/feds-appoint-ai-...
oefrha 2y ago
While some regulations might be beneficial, it’s sad that the opinion of an 80-year-old on nascent technology carries so much weight…

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Will it be able to generate an image of the most common misspelling of the large hadron collider?

ben_w 2y ago
Almost certainly as we don't have the same fear of our own bodies this side of the Atlantic, e.g. spinning advert cube near my apartment has "Dildo King" on one face.

pjmlp 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mytailorisrich 2y ago

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.

sofixa 2y ago
That industrial policy is already here: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-chips-act_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  I should have added "effective" policy, then ;)

RandomLensman 2y ago

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.

robertlagrant 2y ago
With the viable markets you wouldn't need nearly so much investment. People can make money from this; they'll invest.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Yes, but unless you fear state funding crowding out public funding, having some state sponsored research doesn't strike me as wrong (could be more basic science, different directions, etc.) - even if there is great investment market.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    I don't fear it; I just don't think it's necessary. Just as I don't fear state funded lawnmower manufacturing.
    - RandomLensman 2y ago
      If Europe wants to finally put the Capital Markets Union and some associated bits in place properly it might indeed not be needed. More defense spending in Europe is probably also creating some new funding opportunities.

RecycledEle 2y ago

[flagged]

goethes_kind 2y ago

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.

krageon 2y ago
While your comment on the bureaucracy of the EU is reasonable and realistic, the comment on the use (or lack of it) of most science has very little to do with Europe. I've spent literal years implementing the newest natural language processing papers in practice and over 90% of them cannot be replicated or are replicable but the results are fabrications (generally statistical lies or other types of misrepresentation). The text of the paper is almost never in line with the actual numbers and the numbers are not in line with reality. Perhaps ironically I did feel like I was right to leave the academic world. I wouldn't like to professionally wade through the intellectual equivalent of shit for decades on end. A few years were more than enough.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  My field is different, but as someone from the industry side that keeps up with our counterpart in academia....most of what is being published is worthless. It serves no purpose other than to inflate publishing statistics. It has a lot of relevant keywords, but nothing I can actually use in industry to solve the problem the paper reports to. For example, there will be a paper on how to fix X and I'll get really excited, but then realize that the idea shows that the person fundamentally doesn't understand the field and then they'll apply some obscure algorithm that is vastly inferior to the state of the art 20 years ago on a tiny model and then claim success.

ctrw 2y ago

If you want a CERN for AI you need to build a fab for affordable graphics cards with good software support and high vram.

spiderfarmer 2y ago
Or you tackle a commercially interesting problem first and fund the research to tape out more efficient chips in cooperation with ASML and NXP.

Almondsetat 2y ago

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?

orbifold 2y ago
It cost 6 billion to build the current collider (in an existing tunnel) and CERN has a budget of 1-2 billion per year. In terms of data they are easily producing 100x of previous colliders.

mistermann 2y ago

> 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. :(

groestl 2y ago

Haven't they changed their Name to NERDS recently? ;) https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-change-name-70th-anniversary https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-change-name-70th-anniv...

alephnerd 2y ago

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.

fforflo 2y ago

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.

kmmlng 2y ago
I'm not sure how it is for the companies, but as universities involved in EU projects, the amount of bureaucracy is just overwhelming and there are so many nonsensical requirements, that you don't get to do any interesting work. Overall, it barely seems worth it.

pxtail 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]