European physics research centre CERN and Mistral AI have established a long-term strategic partnership to develop a foundation model for scientific discovery, the two organisations said yesterday.
The statement of intent gives the French AI company access to one of the world’s largest scientific datasets as it seeks to compete on frontier science.
Mistral chief executive officer Arthur Mensch wrote in an article published in Le Monde yesterday that frontier models were ‘now indispensable to scientific progress’ and criticised companies that keep their advantages to themselves.
CERN chief information officer Enrica Porcari said the new partnership would ‘advance AI capabilities that can serve the whole physics community and be shared.’
The partners aim to build a ‘large physics model,’ called ‘Flare’, which CERN said in a statement would be the first foundation model for collider physics, trained on billions of simulated particle collisions.
It will use the same idea as the large language models behind generative AI but be trained on collision data rather than text, a CERN spokesperson told Reuters.
It is meant to replace some specialised algorithms now used to reconstruct and identify particles.
The spokesperson said CERN has been using AI to turn raw data from experiments into pictures of the events for a decade, but with multiple tools used for each step.
CERN holds about one exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider.
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