Thales’ cortAIx Lab and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) have joined forces to focus on a range of generative AI use cases, in particular for intelligence and command applications.
Thales is a major player in trusted, cybersafe, transparent, explainable and ethical AI for armed forces, aircraft manufacturers and critical infrastructure operators.
In artificial intelligence, the CEA is uniquely positioned across the entire AI value chain, with skills ranging from algorithms and software development tools to computing architectures and microelectronics.
Bertrand Tavernier, Chief Technical Officer for Thales’s Secure Communications and Information Systems business: “This partnership with the CEA’s AI teams will combine the power of their research with our work at cortAIx, Thales’s AI accelerator, which brings together the Group’s technological expertise and deep knowledge of the defence and security sectors. Our customers — governments, armed forces, critical infrastructure operators — need trusted, sovereign generative AI solutions for their critical missions.”
Alexandre Bounouh, Director of the CEA’s List Institute, specializing in smart digital systems: “This partnership builds on the long-standing collaboration between the CEA and Thales and extends it to the sensitive issue of generative AI, combining the expertise and excellence of the CEA’s research teams in AI safety and security with cortAIx’s strengths in the strategic domain of defence and security. It will support the CEA’s mission in safety, security and artificial intelligence with our partners and all institutional and industry stakeholders in this field.”
Generative AI can be developed to accelerate OODA command loops (observe, orient, decide, act) and implemented across the entire critical decision chain: sensing and data gathering, data transmission and storage, data processing, and decision support.
Generative AI will serve as a trusted, smart assistant for users, enabling them to dialogue easily and efficiently with complex systems to facilitate and accelerate human decision-making and the tempo of operations.
For intelligence gathering, for example, multimodal generative AI will make it possible to simultaneously extract, process, correlate and interpret different types of information from multiple sources — such as the web, social media and sensors in a theatre of operations — to generate summaries and accelerate the production of reliable reports.
Thales’s cortAIx Lab and the CEA will also focus on interoperability within coalitions. To simplify communication between member states in the context of a joint operation, trusted generative AI will facilitate interaction between operators and complex systems by translating their intentions into a sequence of actions and translating technical terms into the languages of the various nations involved.
The hardware and software solutions developed by the CEA with its academic and industry partners are aimed at applications where AI quality and performance are critical.
They include sovereign applications for which the CEA is its own customer (cybersecurity, defence, energy) and industrial applications to which the CEA contributes its expertise.
The CEA has developed high-level expertise in AI technologies, enabling the agency to support its industry partners in the development of innovative solutions.
Working with Thales, the CEA teams will be applying their expertise more specifically to develop LLMs (large language models) and VLMs (vision language models) for the sectors and use cases targeted by Thales.
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