Thales has announced the creation of cortAIx, which brings together the company’s AI capabilities in research, sensors and systems.
The firm say that cortAIx is the AI accelerator that will equip armed forces, aircraft manufacturers and all critical infrastructure operators with highly secure solutions to provide them with more efficient data analysis and decision support, whilst taking into account specific constraints such as cybersecurity, embeddability and frugality that are related to critical environments.
“With over 600 AI experts, around 100 doctoral students in AI and a top-tier network of industry, start-up and academic partners, Thales has been a major player in trusted, transparent, explainable and ethical AI for the past decade. The company is Europe’s top patent applicant in the field of AI for critical applications, and has incorporated AI into over a hundred of its products and services.”
Thales Chairman and CEO Patrice Caine, said:
“Our company, which is a European leader in the fields of civil and defence high-tech, is able to draw on its mastery of AI and on the assets that are its strength: its technological expertise, its knowledge of critical domains – defence and aerospace, space, cybersecurity, digital identity – and its management of constrained environments. Thales is already developing embeddable, frugal, trusted, explainable and secure end-to-end solutions, and today it is moving to the next level by acquiring major AI capabilities, that meet the security and sovereignty needs of our customers.”
Small fry compared to other major investors in AI and ML algorithms
It depends. There are some impressive AI features as far as interface with human is concerned, but mathematically speaking, nothing is really impressive so far in the use cases we can see. I think Thales is less focused on user experience, as far as I hear for French activities. The big thing is in algorithmics where you can say big fries exists, but they just don’t. US mathematicians are good, Russians are ok, but all countries have a limited supply of real mathematicians. That’s the one Thales is looking for. You are talking about 200 or 300 individuals per class of age in country like France, may be half that in UK. USA seem in a struggle to have as many as France, but I would not write them off, because when they want something… They usually get it. UK have a long mathematics history and way of thinking. We’ll see.
France has Mistral AI, read about it, supposedly the next big thing in AI
What could go wrong?
Talking of Thales:
Inside Britain’s £1.4billion spy drone ‘unmitigated disaster’ as they’re branded too heavy and struggle in bad weather
BRITAIN’S fleet of spy drones has been labelled an “unmitigated disaster” as the devices are too heavy and struggle in bad weather. The Ministry of Defence has so far stumped up £1.4billion of taxpayers’ money on 54 Watchkeeper WK450 drones to be used by the UK’s armed forces. But multiple crashes are being blamed on endless add-ons – including 265 user requirements and 1,910 system modifications.
They are also restricted to certain weather conditions, critics claim, while eight have been written off at a cost of £40million. Tory MP and former Armed Forces Minister Mark Francois said the drones – which cost £5million each – are already “obsolete”. Mr Francois is leading a Commons Defence Committee investigation into the issue and said the scheme has been an “unmitigated disaster, arriving years late and effectively already obsolescent”, reports The Times. The Watchkeeper drones are based on Israel’s Hermes 450 drone, nicknamed the ‘Zik’, which is understood to be is use over Gaza and in Lebanon. The unmanned Israeli aircraft has been called the “best drone in the world” by retired Army major Chris Lincoln-Jones – who was asked to analyse it as part of the development of the Watchkeeper. The Hermes 450 can spy on targets for up to 17 hours at an altitude of 18,000ft. The British alternative is not thought to be used in deployments but rather training exercises.
So there is big money around…seriously, a bit more good old “HI”, Human Intelligence, is needed to manage this, please! £1.4m would buy another Astute or 3 * T31, 10 + F35Bs.
Make that £1.4bn…. Lol 😁
These have been troubled for years. Interestingly however it’s difficult to reconcile the statements that they are both ‘obsolescent’ and based on the ‘best drone in the World’ after all the mods were supposed to make them even better, so perhaps ‘don’t work’ might be more accurate because if they did work as planned then they would also be amongst the best in the World.
I can only think they modded it in a way that made it so heavy that the thing don’t fly well.
“They are also restricted to certain weather conditions”
Without detail that is basically BS, all drones are restricted by weather.
Also concerning Thales, they just came saying that APAR radar was not responsible for the failure to fire ESSM missiles in Iver Huitfeldt against Houthi drones.
A rather poor show by the Danish Navy specially since in leaked words of ship captain they know they had issues with fire control system and also went into the missions with more than 30 year old 76mm rounds past operational life- half exploding earlier than they should against drones – still it seems that were the guns that destroyed the 4 drones –
The ship returned to Denmark 1 month earlier. and investigation opened.
Danish chief of defence just dismissed.