The Linux Foundation’s Deep Learning Foundation – an umbrella group for several projects in this area – has announced Athena, the first release from the Acumos AI initiative, which is based on code originally submitted by AT&T. The US operator kicked off the program with a view to lowering the barriers to entry to AI, which it intends to use aggressively in its own operations, including planning and optimizing its networks. AT&T has donated code in order to kickstart several open source projects, and as these start to release their first software one by one, it is becoming easier to join the dots between them and discern a broad, telecoms software platform being driven heavily by this one operator. For…