A personal anecdote to support your point: The first company I worked for in Europe was a well-established ML company that had been doing predictive analytics long (10+ years) before the current fad.

Founded by a former professor from CERN, and staffed about 90% from CERN postdocs. I was the only member of my team who was not a co-author on the Higgs boson discovery paper.

So yeah, people at CERN are pretty well aware of what can be done with ML.

I never said CERN doesn't use ML. But I would imagine google has more ML experts and computational capacity then CERN. Correct me if i'm wrong. There is nothing wrong with collaboration.