Ep 93 - From Reading Papers in the Gym to a Billion-Dollar AI Company | Cohere's Untold Story
Aidan Gomez is the CEO and co-founder of Cohere. Aidan was an intern at Google Brain in 2017, when he helped co-author the now-famous “Attention Is All You Need” paper that conceptualized the transformer and eventually kicked off the Generative AI boom. He then left Google in 2021 to start Cohere, an AI startup valued at over $5b, that specializes in building LLMs for enterprise customers. In this conversation, we cover it all - from Aidan's childhood in Canada, his foray into computers and the internet, landing an internship at Google by accident, starting Cohere and what sets Cohere apart from other LLM businesses.
The Aarthi and Sriram Show · Aidan Gomez, Cohere, Aarthi and Sriram, Aarthi Ramamurthy, Sriram Krishnan
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Show Notes
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction to Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere
2:12 Childhood and growing up in Canada
5:50 Getting into computers and internet
10:30 Sending cold emails
14:20 How to work with Aidan
16:40 The AI paper - "Attention is all you need"
18:45 Starting Cohere
21:10 Why choose enterprise (vs consumer) as a market
24:45 AI strategy
28:20 Hallucinations in LLM models
30:10 Enterprise software and security implications
32:05 Deloitte, Accenture and the impact of generative AI
36:40 Will LLM scaling laws hit a plateau?
38:50 AGI, reasoning and inference for LLM models
41:30 Synthetic data - what is it? Why is it interesting?
43:25 Looking ahead - what is the Cohere's strategy?
46:00 Cohere's capital structure
49:15 Enterprise Use Cases
52:10 Advice for founders - adaptability
54:15 Thank you
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