16 comments

  • intoXbox 1 hour ago
    They used a custom neural net with autoencoders, which contain convolutional layers. They trained it on previous experiment data.

    https://arxiv.org/html/2411.19506v1

    Why is it so hard to elaborate what AI algorithm / technique they integrate? Would have made this article much better

    • dcanelhas 36 minutes ago
      I'm half expecting to see "AI model" appearing as stand-in for "linear regression" at this point in the cycle.
      • ninjagoo 10 minutes ago
        > I'm half expecting to see "AI model" appearing as stand-in for "linear regression" at this point in the cycle.

        Already the case with consulting companies, have seen it myself

      • phire 29 minutes ago
        I'm sure I've seen basic hill climbing (and other optimisation algorithms) described as AI, and then used evidence of AI solving real-world science/engineering problems.
        • LiamPowell 8 minutes ago
          Historically this was very much in the field of AI, which is such a massive field that saying something uses AI is about as useful as saying it uses mathematics. Since the term was first coined it's been constantly misused to refer to much more specific things.

          From around when the term was first coined: "artificial intelligence research is concerned with constructing machines (usually programs for general-purpose computers) which exhibit behavior such that, if it were observed in human activity, we would deign to label the behavior 'intelligent.'" [1]

          [1]: https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1963.1057864

  • serendipty01 1 hour ago
    Might be related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8HT_XBGQUI (Big Data and AI at the CERN LHC by Dr. Thea Klaeboe Aarrestad)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IZwhbsjhvE (From Zettabytes to a Few Precious Events: Nanosecond AI at the Large Hadron Collider by Thea Aarrestad)

    Page: https://www.scylladb.com/tech-talk/from-zettabytes-to-a-few-...

  • quijoteuniv 1 hour ago
    A bit of hype in the AI wording here. This could be called a chip with hardcoded logic obtained with machine learning
    • FartyMcFarter 1 hour ago
      AI is not a new thing, and machine learned logic definitely counts as AI.
      • monkeydust 32 minutes ago
        For those that have experience with ML, yes. For those that have recently become acquainted with it (more on business side) they seem to really struggle with this in my experience. '
      • volemo 13 minutes ago
        Yeah, and don’t forget Eliza!
    • killingtime74 1 hour ago
      Is a LLM logic in weights derived from machine learning?
      • quijoteuniv 1 hour ago
        Good one… but Is a DB query filter AI? I forgot to say though is sounds like a really cool thing to do
        • stingraycharles 1 hour ago
          Strictly speaking, expert systems are AI as well, as in, an expert comes up with a bunch of if/else rules. So yes technically speaking even if they didn’t acquire the weights using ML and hand-coded them, it could still be called AI.
          • phire 19 minutes ago
            It is 100% valid to label an algorithm that plays tic-tac-toe as "AI"

            Much of the early AI research was spent on developing various algorithms that could play board games.

            Didn't even need computers, one early AI was MENACE [1], a set of 304 matchboxes which could learn how to play noughts and crosses.

            [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

            • stingraycharles 6 minutes ago
              Yup this is exactly my point, in the 80s there were plenty of “AI” companies and “fuzzy logic” was the buzzword of the day.
      • shlewis 1 hour ago
        Well, yes. That's literally what it is.
        • dmd 45 minutes ago
          What what is? The article has nothing to do with LLMs. It even explicitly says they don’t use LLMs.
  • WhyNotHugo 59 minutes ago
    Intuitively, I’ve always had an impression that using an analogue circuit would be feasible for neural networks (they just matrix multiplication!). These should provide instantaneous output.

    Isn’t this kind of approach feasible for something so purpose-built?

  • mentalgear 45 minutes ago
    That's what Groq did as well: burning the Transformer right onto a chip (I have to say I was impressed by the simplicity, but afterwards less so by their controversial Kushner/Saudi investment) .
    • NitpickLawyer 23 minutes ago
      > That's what Groq did as well: burning the Transformer right onto a chip

      Are you perhaps confusing Groq with the Etched approach? IIUC Etched is the company that "burned the transformer onto a chip". Groq uses LPUs that are more generalist (they can run many transformers and some other architectures) and their speed comes from using SRAM.

  • Janicc 33 minutes ago
    I think chips having a single LLM directly on them will be very common once LLMs have matured/reached a ceiling.
  • v9v 34 minutes ago
    Do they actually have ASICs or just FPGAs? The article seems a bit unclear.
  • nerolawa 18 minutes ago
    the fact that 99% of LHC data is just gone forever is insane
  • rakel_rakel 1 hour ago
    Hey Siri, show me an example of an oxymoron!

    > CERN is using extremely small, custom large language models physically burned into silicon chips to perform real-time filtering of the enormous data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

    • sh3rl0ck 1 hour ago
      There's no mention of SLMs or LLMs, though.

      > This work represents a compelling real-world demonstration of “tiny AI” — highly specialised, minimal-footprint neural networks

      FPGAs for Neural Networks have been s thing since before the LLM era.

      • 100721 1 hour ago
        Huh? The first paragraph literally says they are using LLMs

        > [ GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — March 28, 2026 ] — CERN is using extremely small, custom large language models physically burned into silicon chips to perform real-time filtering of the enormous data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

        • SiempreViernes 1 hour ago
          the site might have fixed it, to me it says "artificial intelligence" instead of LLM, still bad but not" steaming pile of poo on you bank statement" bad
    • msla 1 hour ago
      Are they some ancient small-scale integration VLSI design? Do they broadcast on a low-frequency VHF band? Face it: Oxymorons like those are part of the technical world. "VLSI" was a current term back when whole CPUs were made out of fewer transistors than we use for register files now, and "VHF" is low frequency even by commercial broadcasting standards.
      • rakel_rakel 1 hour ago
        haha, yea they are part of it for sure, and I'm not dunking on the use of them, but I rather smile a bit when I stumble upon them.

        Like (~9K) Jumbo Frames!

  • seydor 1 hour ago
    cern has been using neural networks for decades
  • randomNumber7 1 hour ago
    Does string theory finally make sense when we ad AI hallucinations?
  • 100721 1 hour ago
    Does anyone know why they are using language models instead of a more purpose-built statistical model? My intuition is that a language model would either be overfit, or its training data would have a lot of noise unrelated to the application and significantly drive up costs.
    • LeoWattenberg 1 hour ago
      It's not an LLM, it is a purpose built model. https://arxiv.org/html/2411.19506v1

      5 years ago we would've called it a Machine Learning algorithm. 5 years before that, a Big Data algorithm.

      • IanCal 1 hour ago
        We’ve been calling neural nets AI for decades.

        > 5 years before that, a Big Data algorithm.

        The DNN part? Absolutely not.

        I don’t know why people feel the need for such revisionism but AI has been a field encompassing things far more basic than this for longer than most commenters have been alive.

        • magicalhippo 1 hour ago
          > AI has been a field encompassing things far more basic than this for longer than most commenters have been alive.

          When I was 13, having just started programming, I picked up a book from a "junk bin" at a book store on Artificial Intelligence. It must have been from the mid-80s if not older.

          It had an entire chapter on syllogism[1] and how to implement a program to spit them out based on user input. As I recall it basically amounted to some string exteaction assuming user followed a template and string concatenation to generate the result. I distinctly recall not being impressed about such a trivial thing being part of a book on AI.

          [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism

          • rjh29 30 minutes ago
            Eliza was 1960s.

            In the 1990s I remember taking my friend's IRC chat history and running it through a Markov model to generate drivel, which was really entertaining.

      • t0lo 1 hour ago
        i hate that we're in this linguistic soup when it comes to algorithmic intelligence now.
    • kevmo314 1 hour ago
      This might be some journalistic confusion. If you go to the CERN documentation at https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMSPublic/AXOL1TL2025 it states

      > The AXOL1TL V5 architecture comprises a VICReg-trained feature extractor stacked on top of a VAE.

    • dmd 44 minutes ago
      … they’re not? Who said they are? The article even explicitly says they’re not?
  • Remi_Etien 1 hour ago
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  • claytonia 1 hour ago
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  • TORcicada 2 hours ago
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