We're existing in a really consequential period in history where we're getting hit by a massive geopolitical change and a massive technological change at the same time. If we don't have strong allies, if we don't integrate ourselves closely with our friends, we won't exist as a country. I do believe the technology is going to be the most consequential to national competitiveness of any technology we've seen before.
Hello and welcome to the interview from Times Tech, our Sunday conversation with some of the key people who are shaping technology. I'm Katie Prescott and this week I am very excited to say that I've been speaking to Aidan Gomez, the boss of Cohere, which is a very rare AI company for several reasons. It's one of the rare companies that's actually building large language models. But unlike most businesses building LLMs which are based in America in China, Cohere was born like Aidan in Canada and he has a really particular mission to develop sovereign AI and he's very very conscious of where AI is built and who owns it. So here's my chat with Aidan Gomez from Cohere. Aidan, thanks so much for joining us here on the Times Tech podcast. I've wanted to do this interview for a while now, so I'm absolutely delighted you're here.
No, likewise. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Just walk us through what Cohere does. For listeners who don't know much about the company. How do you explain it to people?
We're a model builder. So, we're one of the companies that builds these large language models, we deploy them not into like consumer applications like a ChatGPT, that type of thing. Instead we're focused on critical industries so enterprises. So think financial services, healthcare, telecommunications infrastructure, basically places where it is the critical infrastructure of the economy and the security of those systems and the data that those systems hold is often times like a national security concern right like if the grid goes down you know that's a catastrophic impact if the financial system goes down if the internet goes down in a country. These are like critical to the operation and functioning of society. That's the place that Cohere specializes in.
There are so few companies doing this and most of them are based in the US and China. And you're incredibly rare because you've emerged from Canada.
What made you want to get into this space and also think that you could take on the very very well-funded American marketer?
Canada has a very long history in AI similar to Britain. So we have you know the great British Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. We have Yoshua Bengio. They won the Nobel Prize for their work. They basically like invented deep learning which is the thing that has given us the entire AI revolution that we're seeing now and that was a product of early Canadian investment in R&D so when I went to the University of Toronto with my co-founders we were sort of raised into AI. Jeff was teaching there he had built a lab. Those folks were the ones that really built all of this and so it was natural like going into AI was just a product of my environment, of course a product of my interests and you know I from a very early age was fascinated with AI like everyone else is you know reading sci-fi and playing video games and the notion or the idea of intelligence or even like consciousness it felt like over the past 100 years, we have gotten such a strong understanding of physics and like the natural world. We can predict things down to like arbitrary precision. Like we just we understand it so well that we can know what will happen. But almost none of that has translated into something useful to understanding what intelligence is. And so it felt kind of like the last mystery. And so as a field of pursuit, it was always very attractive and then I just happened to be, you know, born in the place and at the university where it was all happening.
Of course, when you say it like that, that is where it was all happening. I'd just rather forgotten that was part of the story because so much of the story now is concentrated on the West Coast. I mean, do you feel like there is still that rich seam of expertise in Canada today?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean the legacy like carries on. There's extraordinary researchers that come out of Toronto, Waterloo, Mila, Montreal. And yeah like I remember when I went to Google I was in undergrad and I walked into the HQ in Silicon Valley in Mountain View and on my very first day I had just gotten my badge, my computer. I'd gone through orientation. And I was walking to like my building where my team the Google Brain team was sitting and I walk past the kitchen and I hear French, Quebecois French, you know, Canadian French and I look over and it's Samy Bengio, Yoshua Bengio's brother and like I realized I was in the heart of Silicon Valley in what was at that time like the most advanced AI lab on the face of the planet. and I was surrounded by Canadians like they were everywhere. And so I was kind of like, Canada invented this.
And I want to talk about sovereignty shortly because it's become such an important issue this year. But let's take it right back to how you got to university in the first place and what drew you into AI because you didn't grow up in a busy city, you know, kind of perhaps where more tech was going on. Tell us about your upbringing. Quite non-technical maybe describing.
Yeah. Yeah. I grew up in... I was born in Toronto, but at one year old, my parents moved into a cabin in the woods that my dad had built. So my dad and grandfather, they're immigrants from Spain. My mom's Canadian, she's an immigrant from Britain, from the UK. And my dad had bought this like big plot of land, like 150 acres, in rural Ontario. And then on that plot of land, he read a book on how to build cabins and started cutting down trees on the property and like stripping them and drying them out and then coating them, like doing the whole thing. And he built a little cabin for my grandpa. And my grandpa moved in there and he lived there for ages. There was like no running water, no electricity. he just like totally lived off the grid. And then they, the two of them, my dad and grandpa, decided, 'Oh, we're going to build a larger cabin and it's going to be like our cottage.' And so then they built a much larger cabin still with like trees from the forest. And then at some point my mom and dad decided, you know, that's going to be our house. And so we moved into this what was supposed to be the cottage, which was like a log cabin built by my dad and grandpa. There was electricity and running water and a well at that stage but it was very disconnected. I didn't have neighbors for like kilometers in every direction and yeah you're just in nature. You're in the woods. And we didn't really have any we didn't have a lot of tech. Like we didn't have satellite TV. We didn't really have internet. We had dialup forever because there was no high speed and eventually satellite internet started to get a little bit good. But by that time I was like 16 I almost moved out of the house. So for a long time I was so disconnected from technology. I think it developed in me as this affinity towards it. It was like this thing that was like just out of reach that everyone else had access to that was like transforming the world. But I couldn't have it, you know, and so there was this deep appreciation for it. Like I guess like being constrained from it or pulled back from it gave me an appreciation for just how incredible it is. And that sort of like fostered the obsession with it.
And do you think that's what took you on to university and sort of move away from the cabin and never were alive?
Well, I was just Yeah. I mean like I knew then that you know what I wanted to work on was technology and computing and AI was a curiosity at that point but when I started at the university and was sort of like embedded into this ecosystem that had such a deep history in AI had contributed so much it just pulled me in. I got obsessed with it. I was like every waking minute of my day reading papers like trying to understand the state-of-the-art in AI and what makes it tick and what has caused progress and then trying to help push that forward like reaching out to professors. I remember I sent an email to Jeff Hinton and I didn't know who he was like he hadn't won the Nobel Prize at that point. and won the Turing Award. And I just kept seeing this name on important papers and it was Jeff Hinton and he was a professor at UofT. I was like, 'Oh my god, he's here.' And so I was like, 'I can email him.' I sent him an email with like my idea. I'm like, 'Hey, I read your paper on this, you know, I think that's wrong. Like I think you should have done this instead.' And you know, this is like the hubris of second-year undergrad child Aidan. and he replied. He responded and he took the time to be like, 'It's an interesting idea, but I don't think that will work because of X, Y, and Z.' And he like engaged with it. So that was yeah, that was sort of the seed of it. And then Jeff brought me into the machine learning group in Toronto. I went down to Google. Then I started working for Jeff at Google. Met my co-founders and the rest is history.
And is that why you reached out to Google at that particular time? Because again like reaching out to Jeff, you also reached out to them for a job, didn't you?
Yes, I did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, like a lot of these papers, it was Google Brain everywhere. Google Brain, Google Brain, all like the important papers. And so Google Brain was like the Bell Labs for AI. It was like an industry lab that was super well resourced and so they could do experiments that in academia were hard to do. And they also had complete intellectual freedom. So they were not like Google the company was not saying hey you need to research these things. It was just like let's get the smartest people possible give them some resources and see what comes out. And yeah I just started bombarding them with emails. not so much to get a job like it was again like this idea like I would have an idea about their paper and I would see it and be like oh did you try this did you maybe we could apply this to that and I would just ask the researchers and they would reply and then eventually one was like oh you know what I would want to work on that I have an intern slot this summer and that catalyzed the process. but yeah It's sort of been like a snowball.
And what's it been like, you know, that snowball rolling, but at the same time watching what's been going on at Anthropic, at OpenAI, at Google, the giants that are just, you know, it feels like gobbling up so much of this space and building a competitor to that. And are you conscious of that?
I mean, of course, I'm conscious of my competitors and not the biggest fans of them. you know, I respect them a lot, but I think there's a lot that they do that I don't admire. You know, things like some of the fear-mongering that has come out of those labs. And you know, a certain degree of economic inefficiency that you can see with Cohere, we haven't done one of these like mega rounds. And we don't do a consumer offering. And so because of that, I think we fly slightly under the radar despite the work that we do. It's like fundamentally the same as what they're doing. And the other thing that we've done is we've avoided selling huge chunks of our company to the hyperscalers.
So those deals like those are sort of the Microsoft investment in AI and Amazon and Anthropic.
