Key points
- Cohere's Aleph Alpha combination would create a Canadian-German company, CEO Aidan Gomez says.
- Gomez says sovereign AI means no one can switch off your access to AI, a risk the Mythos shutdown made real.
- Gomez says Cohere went enterprise because no one was buying large language models, and a consumer bet would likely have killed it.
Why Cohere bet on sovereign AI over consumers
Cohere is a bet that AI companies will make their money selling to institutions rather than consumers. Gomez co-wrote the Transformer paper as a teenager, and when he founded Cohere in 2019 nobody was buying large language models, so he built a platform other companies could build on. That bet now reads as sovereignty. After the US cut off Mythos access for non-Americans, governments want AI nobody can switch off, and Cohere's Canadian and German identity suits a fractured European market.
Takeaways
- Sovereign AI means resilience through diversification. Gomez defines it as nobody being able to switch off your access to AI, and as control over where it runs and who sees the data. After Mythos was cut off for non-Americans, he says the risk is proven and Cohere plans for it recurring.
- No market pushed Cohere into enterprise. Nobody was buying large language models in 2019 and Cohere did not know what product to build, so it built a platform for other companies' products. Gomez says a consumer bet would probably have killed the company.
- Cohere is now Canadian and German. The announced combination with Aleph Alpha makes Cohere multi-continental, with headquarters in Berlin and Toronto and offices in Seoul, Tokyo and Riyadh. Gomez calls Europe immense and fractured, with a hot war on its eastern border forcing the sovereignty question.
- Global hiring gave Cohere a multilingual edge. COVID pushed Cohere to hire wherever the talent was, adding people in Singapore and London, which made the company strong at multilingual work and translation. Gomez hates remote work but runs a very remote company, with leadership spread across five cities.
- The most general product is usually wrong. Gomez says building the most general thing is not the fastest path to revenue, but on an extremely new technology with no users and no market it is what you are forced to do. Betting everything on one product will likely kill you.
- Wrong cofounders are worse than founding solo. Gomez would recommend founding alone over founding with the wrong partners, and he and Nick Frosst treated their partnership as a marriage, a permanent commitment. Jacobs argues three founders is the most powerful configuration, since a pair can deadlock with no mediator.
How Cohere began
- Gomez's Google manager Lukasz Kaiser emailed him a Wikipedia article about a Japanese punk band called The Transformer. Kaiser wrote one sentence and the machine wrote the rest.
- Before the Transformer, machines could barely spell a sentence. Almost overnight they produced plausible human text, which Gomez saw as a new interface for computers.