An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Advanced artificial intelligence is to revolutionize fundamental physics and could open a window on to the fate of the universe, according to Cern's next director general. Prof Mark Thomson, the British physicist who will assume leadership of Cern on 1 January 2026, says machine learning is paving the way for advances in particle physics that promise to be comparable to the AI-powered prediction of protein structures that earned Google DeepMind scientists a Nobel prize in October. At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), he said, similar strategies are being used to detect incredibly rare events that hold the key to how particles came to acquire mass in the first moments after the big bang and whether our universe could be teetering on the brink of a catastrophic collapse.

"These are not incremental improvements," Thomson said. "These are very, very, very big improvements people are making by adopting really advanced techniques." "It's going to be quite transformative for our field," he added. "It's complex data, just like protein folding -- that's an incredibly complex problem -- so if you use an incredibly complex technique, like AI, you're going to win."

The intervention comes as Cern's council is making the case for the Future Circular Collider, which at 90km circumference would dwarf the LHC. Some are skeptical given the lack of blockbuster results at the LHC since the landmark discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and Germany has described the $17 billion proposal as unaffordable. But Thomson said AI has provided fresh impetus to the hunt for new physics at the subatomic scale -- and that major discoveries could occur after 2030 when a major upgrade will boost the LHC's beam intensity by a factor of ten. This will allow unprecedented observations of the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God particle, that grants mass to other particles and binds the universe together. Thomson is now confident that the LHC can measure Higgs boson self-coupling, a key factor in understanding how particles gained mass after the Big Bang and whether the Higgs field is in a stable state or could undergo a future transition. According to Thomson: "It's a very deep fundamental property of the universe, one we don't fully understand. If we saw the Higgs self-coupling being different from our current theory, that that would be another massive, massive discovery. And you don't know until you've made the measurement."

The report also notes how AI is being used in "every aspect of the LHC operation." Dr Katharine Leney, who works on the LHC's Atlas experiment, said: "When the LHC is colliding protons, it's making around 40m collisions a second and we have to make a decision within a microsecond ... which events are something interesting that we want to keep and which to throw away. We're already now doing better with the data that we've collected than we thought we'd be able to do with 20 times more data ten years ago. So we've advanced by 20 years at least. A huge part of this has been down to AI."

Generative AI is also being used to look for and even produce dark matter via the LHC. "You can start to ask more complex, open-ended questions," said Thomson. "Rather than searching for a particular signature, you ask the question: 'Is there something unexpected in this data?'"

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Salesforce is cutting jobs as its latest fiscal year gets underway, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter, even as the company simultaneously hires workers to sell new artificial intelligence products. From the report: More than 1,000 roles will be affected, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. Displaced workers will be able to apply for other jobs internally, the person added. Salesforce had nearly 73,000 workers as of January 2024, when that fiscal year ended.

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AI systems that pose "unacceptable risk" or harm can now be banned in the European Union. Some of the unacceptable AI activities include social scoring, deceptive manipulation, exploiting personal vulnerabilities, predictive policing based on appearance, biometric-based profiling, real-time biometric surveillance, emotion inference in workplaces or schools, and unauthorized facial recognition database expansion. TechCrunch reports: Under the bloc's approach, there are four broad risk levels: (1) Minimal risk (e.g., email spam filters) will face no regulatory oversight; (2) limited risk, which includes customer service chatbots, will have a light-touch regulatory oversight; (3) high risk -- AI for healthcare recommendations is one example -- will face heavy regulatory oversight; and (4) unacceptable risk applications -- the focus of this month's compliance requirements -- will be prohibited entirely.

Companies that are found to be using any of the above AI applications in the EU will be subject to fines, regardless of where they are headquartered. They could be on the hook for up to ~$36 million, or 7% of their annual revenue from the prior fiscal year, whichever is greater. The fines won't kick in for some time, noted Rob Sumroy, head of technology at the British law firm Slaughter and May, in an interview with TechCrunch. "Organizations are expected to be fully compliant by February 2, but ... the next big deadline that companies need to be aware of is in August," Sumroy said. "By then, we'll know who the competent authorities are, and the fines and enforcement provisions will take effect."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In what is becoming a sadly regular occurrence, two popular free software projects, X.org/Freedesktop.org and Alpine Linux, need to rally some of their millions of users so that they can continue operating. Both services have largely depended on free server resources provided by Equinix (formerly Packet.net) and its Metal division for the past few years. Equinix announced recently that it was sunsetting its bare-metal sales and services, or renting out physically distinct single computers rather than virtualized and shared hardware. As reported by the Phoronix blog, both free software organizations have until the end of April to find and fund new hosting, with some fairly demanding bandwidth and development needs.

An issue ticket on Freedesktop.org's GitLab repository provides the story and the nitty-gritty needs of that project. Both the X.org foundation (home of the 40-year-old window system) and Freedesktop.org (a shared base of specifications and technology for free software desktops, including Wayland and many more) used Equinix's donated space. [...] Alpine Linux, a small, security-minded distribution used in many containers and embedded devices, also needs a new home quickly. As detailed in its blog, Alpine Linux uses about 800TB of bandwidth each month and also needs continuous integration runners (or separate job agents), as well as a development box. Alpine states it is seeking co-location space and bare-metal servers near the Netherlands, though it will consider virtual machines if bare metal is not feasible.

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China said Tuesday it has launched an antitrust investigation into Google, part of a swift retaliation after the U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods. From a report: The probe by China's State Administration for Market Regulation will examine alleged monopolistic practices by the U.S. tech giant, which has had its search and internet services blocked in China since 2010 but maintains operations there primarily focused on advertising.

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