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.
But getting new models and insights (in the public domain) is a good idea.
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.
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.
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.