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March 2024 ESRFnews

F

OR what was once a purely technical subject

machine learning has hardly been out of the news

Beginning in late 2022 the world has had to come

to terms with the impact of a number of groundbreaking

generative artificialintelligence AI models notably

the ChatGPT chatbot by the US company OpenAI and

texttoimage systems such as Midjourney developed by

the US company of the same name Everyday conversa

tions cannot avoid the debate over whether we are living

amid a fantastic new industrial revolution or the end of

civilisation as we know it

All this popular controversy can detract from a

quieter but no less important machinelearning

revolution taking place in the scientific realm Arguably

this began in the 1990s with greater computing power

and the development of socalled neural networks

which attempt to mimic the wiring of the brain and

which helped to popularise AI as an overarching term

for machines that ape human thinking The real

acceleration however has taken place in the past decade

or so thanks to the storage and processing of big data

and experiments with layered neural networks what

has come to be called deep learning

Of this revolution synchrotron users who are

among the worlds largest producers of scientific data

stand to be great beneficiaries Machine learning has

Many ESRF scientists are turning to machine-

learning algorithms, for insights that would be too

laborious – even impossible – to gain manually.

The AI revolution