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Should a CERN for AI be completely non-profit?

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  • agrees and says:
    A thought experiment for regulating AI in two distinct regimes is what I call The Island. In this scenario, experts trying to build God-like AGI systems do so in a highly secure facility: an air-gapped enclosure with the best security humans can build. All other attempts to build God-like AI would become illegal; only when such AI were provably safe could they be commercialised “off-island”. This may sound like Jurassic Park, but there is a real-world precedent for removing the profit motive from potentially dangerous research and putting it in the hands of an intergovernmental organisation. This is how Cern, which operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, has worked for almost 70 years. [...] I would support significant regulation by governments and a practical plan to transform these companies into a Cern-like organisation. (2024) source Verified
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  • strongly agrees and says:
    We can’t let the same thing happen with AI. I coded the world wide web on a single computer in a small room. But that small room didn’t belong to me, it was at Cern. Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research. I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever. Regulation and global governance are technically feasible, but reliant on political willpower. If we are able to muster it, we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It’s not too late. (2025) source Verified
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  • agrees and says:
    The key is using data and AI, governed in a fair and democratic way, and deployed for democratic deliberation, not to increased clicks, polarising public opinions and monetizing users’ data. This is the opposite of the public interest. Europe needs a kind of “CERN” or “Manhattan Project” for artificial intelligence: A large-scale, globally cooperative effort to advance human centered AI technology under democratic control, to tackle humanity’s planetary challenges. (2023) source Verified
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  • strongly agrees and says:
    To secure our society's technological independence, foster innovation, and safeguard the democratic principles that underpin our way of life, we must act now. We call upon the global community, particularly the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and other willing countries, to collaborate on a monumental initiative: the establishment of an international, publicly funded, open-source supercomputing research facility. This facility, analogous to the CERN project in scale and impact, should house a diverse array of machines equipped with at least 100,000 high-performance state-of-the-art accelerators (GPUs or ASICs), operated by experts from the machine learning and supercomputing research community and overseen by democratically elected institutions in the participating nations. (2023) source Verified
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  • agrees and says:
    Some advocates, such as computer scientist Gary Marcus, also argue that the CERN model could help advance AI safety research beyond the capacity of any one firm or nation. The new institution could bring together top talent under a mission grounded in principles of scientific openness, adherence to a pluralist view of human values (such as the collective goals of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), and responsible innovation. Similar sentiments have been repeated by other prominent actors in the AI governance ecosystem, including Ian Hogarth, chair of the UK’s AI Safety Institute, who argues that an international research institution offers a way to ensure safer AI research in a controlled and centralized environment without being driven by profit motive. [...] A publicly funded international research organization conducting safety research might be more resilient than private sector labs to economic pressures, and better able to avoid the risk of profit-seeking motives overriding meaningful research into AI safety measures. (2024) source Verified
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  • strongly agrees and says:
    Given the constraints on the current research paradigm, scientists and policy advocates are increasingly coming to the conclusion that a more collaborative and international endeavor is necessary to truly harness the power of AI and ensure it is used for beneficial purposes. Following that model, some scientists and experts like Marcus are calling for an international consortium that is focused on pure AI science and research to serve the public good. This would be a highly interdisciplinary effort that would bring together scientists from many areas, in close collaboration and interaction with industry, politics and the public. A key element would be advancing the many strands of research in this area by discussing common approaches, methods, algorithms, data and their applications. It would foster the basic foundational architecture for AI that other, smaller efforts in university and private labs could plug into. (2018) source Unverified
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  • strongly agrees and says:
    Since 2018, the idea of a “CERN for AI” has been one of the signature elements of the CLAIRE vision for European excellence in AI. The time has come for large-scale and effective investment into publicly owned and operated AI infrastructure, along with cutting-edge research and pre-competitive development capabilities. Now is the time to create a “CERN for AI”! (2024) source Unverified
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  • agrees and says:
    A CERN for AI would essentially have three functions. It would serve as a meeting place, a platform for experts to interact and exchange ideas. Second, it would offer a research environment that the various existing research centers, even the large ones, including the Max Planck Institutes, simply cannot finance on their own. Third, it would be a global magnet for talent to create an alternative to the U.S.-based big tech companies. As a public-sector institution, the Center would be accountable to the public and largely seek to solve problems in the public interest. (2023) source Unverified
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  • agrees and says:
    I have talked about having something like a CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] for AI, which might focus on AI safety. In some industries, we know how to make reliable [products], usually only in narrow domains. One example is bridges: You can't guarantee that a bridge will never fall down, but you can say that, unless there’s an earthquake of a certain magnitude that only happens once every century, we're confident the bridge will still stand. Our bridges don't fall down often anymore. But for AI, we can’t do that at all as an engineering practice—it’s like alchemy. There’s no guarantee that any of it works. So, you could imagine an international consortium trying to either fix the current systems, which I think, in historical perspective, will seem mediocre, or build something better that does offer those guarantees. Many of the big technologies that we have around, from the internet to space ships, were government-funded in the past; it's a myth that in America innovation only comes from the free market. source Unverified
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