Atos and Thales announce the creation of Athea, a joint venture that will develop a sovereign big data and artificial intelligence platform for public and private sector players in the defence, intelligence and internal state security communities. Athea will draw on the experience gained by both companies from the demonstration phase of the ARTEMIS programme, the big data platform of the French Ministry of Armed Forces. The contract to optimise and prepare the full-scale roll-out of the ARTEMIS platform was also awarded jointly to the two leaders by the French Defense Procurement Agency on April 30, 2021. The new joint venture will initially serve the French market before addressing European requirements at a later date. With the exponential rise in the number of sources of information, and increased pressure to respond more quickly to potential issues, State agencies need to manage ever-greater volumes of heterogeneous data and accelerate the development of new AI applications where security and sovereignty are key.

Paris, May 27, 2021 – Atos and Thales announce the creation of Athea, a joint venture that will develop a sovereign big data and artificial intelligence platform for public and private sector players in the defence, intelligence and internal state security communities. Athea will draw on the experience gained by both companies from the demonstration phase of the ARTEMIS programme, the big data platform of the French Ministry of Armed Forces. The contract to optimise and prepare the full-scale roll-out of the ARTEMIS platform was also awarded jointly to the two leaders by the French Defense Procurement Agency on April 30, 2021. The new joint venture will initially serve the French market before addressing European requirements at a later date. With the exponential rise in the number of sources of information, and increased pressure to respond more quickly to potential issues, State agencies need to manage ever-greater volumes of heterogeneous data and accelerate the development of new AI applications where security and sovereignty are key.

AlphaGo has won the fifth of five games of Go against South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-dol. The final game was a close-run thing, spilling into overtime with the AI just half-a-point ahead at one stage. The best-of-five tournament, which saw the software win 4-1, is considered to be a significant moment in the development of artificial intelligence. Go is a sophisticated game with more potential moves than there are atoms in the observable universe, requiring a greater capacity for on-the-fly "thinking". In a post on Google's Asia-Pacific blog, top American go player Michael Redmond said: "It was difficult to say at what point AlphaGo was ahead or behind, a close game throughout. "AlphaGo made what looked like a mistake with move 48, similar to the mistake in Game Four in the middle of the board.

Last night Google's AI AlphaGo won the first in a five-game series against the world's best Go player, in Seoul, South Korea. The success comes just five months after a slightly less experienced version of the same program became the first machine to defeat any Go professional by winning five games against the European champion. This victory was far more impressive though because it came at the expense of Lee Sedol, 33, who has dominated the ancient Chinese game for a decade. The European champion, Fan Hui, is ranked only 663rd in the world. And the machine, by all accounts, played a noticeably stronger game than it did back in October, evidence that it has learned much since then.