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

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.

This is (my simplified version of) Zimbabwe's problem[0]. They heavily invested in education, which is fantastic, but there was no economy to absorb their talents into, so the educated youth left for South Africa and onwards.

As James Carville would say on this topic: "It's the economy, stupid."

That's a hint at the problem. We spend a lot of taxpayer money to train some of the best researchers and scientists in the world, only for them to work for US or Chinese companies boosting their economy instead, because they pay more than the European companies.

Just look at Nvidia, Huawei and Apple, they have an R&D centers next to every top university in Europe or next to every ARM/Nokia/Ericsson office.

The problem isn't the money spent on training/education, it's the lack of top economic opportunities/companies we have in a lot of parts of Europe resulting in our tax money boosting the economies of our economic adversaries, who are less risk averse and more hungry about innovation and monetization.

What you said is all correct, but there are some positive steps as well, for example ELLIS: https://ellis.eu/

ELLIS is a great way to compete with the top US universities. Much more is needed, especially access to computing power, just as the CERN for AI proposal suggests.

(2) EU research:

EU research funding itself is a success:

https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/statement-erc-scienti...

Keep in mind that a lot of the US' current growth comes from its huge budget deficit. Europe has gotten significantly better at the commercialization aspect of research, two out of the three covid vaccines came out of Europe.

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.

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.

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.

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?