Model Plateaus and Enterprise AI Adoption with Cohere's Aidan Gomez

**Sarah** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we're hanging out with Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, a company valued at more than 5 billion in 2024, which provides AI-powered language models and solutions for businesses. Aidan founded Cohere in 2019, but before that, during his time as an intern at Google Brain, he was a co-author on the landmark 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need. Aidan, thanks for coming on today.

**Aidan Gomez** (0:31)
Yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

**Sarah** (0:33)
Maybe we can start just a little bit with the personal background. How do you go from growing up in the woods in Canada to, you know, working on the most important technical paper in the world?

**Aidan Gomez** (0:45)
A lot of luck and chance. But yeah, I happened to go to school at the place where Jeff Hinton taught. And so obviously Jeff recently won the Nobel Prize. He's kind of like attributed with being the godfather of deep learning. In U of T, the school where I went, he was a legend and pretty much everyone who was in computer science, studying at the school, wanted to get into AI. And so in some sense, I feel like I was raised into AI. Like as soon as I stepped out of high school, I was steeped in an environment that really saw the future. And wanted to build it.
And then from there, it was a bunch of happy accidents. So I somehow managed to get an internship with Lukash Kaiser at Google Brain.
And I found out at the end of that internship, I wasn't supposed to have gotten that internship. It was supposed to have been for PhD students. And so they were like throwing a goodbye party for me, the intern. And Lukash was like, okay, so Aidan, you're going back. How many years have you got left in your PhD? And I was like, oh, I'm going back into third year, undergrad. And he was like, we don't do undergrad internships. So I think it was a bunch of like really lucky mistakes that led me to that team.

**Sarah** (2:26)
Working on really interesting, important things at Google, what convinced you that you should start Cohere?

**Aidan Gomez** (2:32)
Yes, I bounced around. Like when I was working with Lukash and Noam and the Transformer guys, I was in Mountain View and then I went back to U of T. Started working with Hinton and my co-founder Nick in Toronto. I brained there. Then I started my PhD and I went to England. I was working with Jakob, who's another Transformer paper author in Berlin.

**Sarah** (2:59)
We had Jakob on the podcast.

**Aidan Gomez** (3:01)
Oh, nice. Yeah. Okay. Fan of the pod. Good. I was working with Jakob in Berlin, and then I was also collaborating remotely with Jeff Dean and Sanjay on Pathways, which was like their bigger than a supercomputer training program. The idea was like wiring together supercomputers to create a new larger unit of compute that you could train models on.
At that stage, GPT-2 had just come out, and it was pretty clear the trajectory of the technology. We were on a very interesting path, and these models that were ostensibly models of the Internet, models of the Web, we're going to yield some pretty interesting things. So I called up Nick, I called up Ivan, my co-founders, and I said, maybe we should figure out how to build these things. I think they're going to be useful.

**Sarah** (4:03)
For anyone who doesn't know yet, can you just describe at the high level what Cohere's mission is and then what the models and products are?

**Aidan Gomez** (4:11)
Yes. Our mission, the way that we want to create value in the world is by enabling other organizations to adopt this technology and make their workforce more productive or transform their product, and the services that they offer. So we're very focused on the enterprise. We're not going to build a chat GBT competitor. What we want to build is a platform and a series of products to enable enterprises to adopt this technology and make it valuable.

**Sarah** (4:40)
In terms of your North Star of how you organize the team and invest, you obviously come from a research background yourself. How much do you think Cohere success is dependent on core models versus other platform and go to market, support investments you make?

**Aidan Gomez** (4:59)
It's all of the above. The models are the foundation. And if you're building on a foundation that doesn't meet the customer's needs, then there's no hope. And so the models are crucial, and it's like the heart of the company. But in the enterprise world, things like customer support, reliability, security, these are all key. And so we've heavily invested on both sides. We're not just a modeling organization, we're a modeling and go to market organization.