AI will make money sooner than you think, says Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for this show comes from Wix Studio. Designers and Devs, you might be able to do your thing better on Wix Studio, a web platform with everything you need to deliver bespoke sites hyper-efficiently. Design teams get a ton of smart features that can take the grind out of web creation without it costing per-pixel control. Dev teams, you get a zero setup developer-first environment, combined with an AI code assistant and your preferred IDE for rapid deployment.
Search Wix Studio today to explore the full range of features.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
At the Coca-Cola company, Keurig Dr. Pepper and PepsiCo, some of our bottles can be remade in a whole new way, using 100 percent recycled plastic. New bottles using no new plastic, except the caps and labels. Learn more at madetoberemade.org.

**Nilay Patel** (0:54)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neal Ipatel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
Today, I'm talking with Aidan Gomez, the CEO and co-founder of Cohere. Notably, Aiden used to work at Google, where he was one of the authors of the paper called Attention Is All You Need, that described transformers and really kicked off the LLM revolution in AI. Cohere is one of the busiest AI startups around right now, but its focus is a little different than many of the others. Unlike, say, OpenAI, it's not making consumer products at all. Instead, Cohere is focused on the enterprise market and making AI products for big companies.
Aiden and I talked a lot about that difference and how it potentially gives Cohere a much clearer path to profitability than some of its competitors. Computing power is expensive, especially in AI. But you'll hear Aiden explain that the way Cohere is structured gives his company an advantage because it doesn't have to spend quite as much money to build its models. One interesting thing you'll also hear Aiden talk about is the benefit of competition in the enterprise space. A lot of the tech industry is very highly concentrated, with only a handful of options for various consumer services.
Regular decoder listeners have heard us talk about this a lot before, especially in AI. If you want GPUs to power your AI models, you're probably buying something from NVIDIA. Ideally, a big stack of NVIDIA H100s, if you can even get any.
But Aiden points out that his enterprise customers are both risk-averse and price-sensitive. They want Cohere to be operating in a competitive landscape, because then they can secure better deals instead of being locked in to a single provider. So Cohere has had to be competitive from the beginning, which Aiden says has made the company thrive.
Aiden and I also talked a lot about what AI can and can't do. We agreed that it's definitely not there yet, it's not ready, whatever you think the future might hold. And Aiden says even if you're training AI on a limited, specific, deep set of data, like contract law, you still need a human in the loop. But he sees a time when AI will eventually surpass human knowledge, even in fields like medicine. You know a thing about me, you know, I am very skeptical of that idea. And then there's the really big tension you'll hear us get into all the way through this episode. Up until recently, computers have been deterministic. If you give computers a certain input, you usually know exactly what output you're gonna get. It's predictable, there's a logic to it. But if we start talking to computers with human language and getting human language back, well, human language is pretty messy. And it makes the entire process of knowing what to put in and what exactly we're gonna get out of our computers different than it's ever been before.
And I really wanted to know if Aiden thinks that LLMs as we have them today can bear the weight of all of our expectations for AI given that messiness. Okay, Aiden Gomez, CEO of Cohere.

**Aidan Gomez** (3:32)
Here we go.

**Nilay Patel** (3:47)
Aidan Gomez, you are the co-founder and CEO of Cohere. Welcome to Decoder.

**Aidan Gomez** (3:50)
Thank you, thank you. Excited to be here.

**Nilay Patel** (3:52)
I'm excited to talk to you. It feels like Cohere has a very different approach to AI. You have a very different approach to AI. I want to talk about all of that, the competitive landscape. I'm dying to know if you think it's a bubble, but I want to start with a very big question.
You are one of the eight co-authors on the paper that started this all. Attention is all you need. That's the paper that described transformers at Google. That's the T in GPTs.