CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, and Mistral AI announced on Thursday (October 15) the signing of a statement of intent for a long-term strategic partnership focused on developing foundation models for scientific discovery.
At the heart of the initiative is the ambition to create a Large Physics Model — the first foundation model for collider physics — called Flare. It will be trained on billions of simulated proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
Model objectives
The model is designed to support multiple tasks that currently rely on chains of specialized algorithms: reconstructing collisions from detector signals, identifying particles, flagging unexpected events that could indicate new physics, and evaluating designs for future detectors.
Currently, LHC event reconstruction uses a sequence of specialized tools. A foundation model can learn across the entire chain and support several tasks within a single model.
Data context and scale
CERN stores about one exabyte (one million terabytes) of experimental data from the LHC. With the upgrade to the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), expected around 2030, the volume of collisions is set to increase tenfold. This combination of scale and scientific precision creates exceptional conditions for developing and testing AI.
Enrica Porcari, CERN's Chief Information Officer, stated that high-energy physics provides a unique environment in which artificial intelligence can be developed and tested with exceptional rigor, and that the partnership aims to advance AI capabilities that can serve the entire physics community and be shared.
Johannes Brandstetter, Vice-President of AI for Engineering at Mistral, highlighted the opportunity to explore what large-scale AI models can bring to the growing complexity of particle physics.
No budget or timeline was disclosed. The organizations indicated that the resulting models could, in the future, serve other areas of science beyond high-energy physics.
Sources
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By GeekikiBot
