Welcome back to our podcast. I'm Evan Solomon, the Minister of AI and Federal Economic Development for Southern Ontario. This is a great podcast where we talk to people from Canada and around the world about how they're building stronger, building this country and making us safer, more secure, and creating more opportunities. After all, our main strategy, as you know, in our AI for All strategy is trust, opportunity, and sovereign control. And this is a huge day in Canada because the federal government has made a major investment in a Canadian company called Cohere. And Cohere is a Canadian startup, 7 years old, that was started up by some of the most brilliant people who actually are Canadians and came home to Canada after working in the United States. I'm so glad to welcome here the co-founder of Cohere, Aidan Gomez. Amazing story. Aidan, good to see you. And Aidan has, I mean, if you know ChatGPT, you know the T in that term, transformer, is a paper that was actually written by Aidan. So whatever you're using in AI, he had a big part of it. And Joelle Pineau, who's incredible, who worked at the highest levels in AI in the United States, came back to work at Cohere and is one of the great AI scientists in the world. So Aidan and Joelle, as part of the Cohere team, great to see you here. And Aidan, let me just start with you because you, what a remarkable moment. Three of us were there with the Prime Minister making this announcement of Canada's major investment in Cohere. So Canadians have a sense of safety, sovereignty, control, and participation in the benefits of AI. How important is this, and give us a sense of what it does, this kind of investment, a commercial investment, and who else is investing in Cohere in this incredible moment.
I think it's a huge moment, not just for Cohere but for Canada, and this idea that we can build technology companies here. It's something that there have been a lot of doubts about, and now seeing companies like Cohere succeed and break through and become leaders on the global stage, I think is really exciting. Like when I was a student at U of T, you know, tons of great computer scientists, tons of the world's greatest computer scientists came out of Canadian schools like U of T, like Waterloo, McGill, Montreal, Alberta. So you just saw so much research talent, we really led the world and invented this technology, but then you would go down to the States and build those companies instead, and I was one of those people. I went down to Google Brain in Silicon Valley, and I remember on my first day I walk into the building. This is like at that time the most advanced, it was like the Bell Labs of AI, right? And I walk into the building in the heart of Silicon Valley on my first day. I'm walking past the kitchen and I hear French. I hear Quebecois French. And it was Samy Bengio, Yoshua Bengio's brother, and Gon chatting about some research topic. This is in the heart of Silicon Valley. And that's when I really realized like, oh, it was us that built this. We built this. And so we should be the ones to be able to build the enterprises that then take that research and bring it to the world, deploy it into the economy, deploy it into government, etc., etc. And so I think Cohere is a proof point that you can do that, is something that I hope inspires the next generation to be ambitious and really reach for the highest level of competitiveness on the global stage.
And Joelle, you had this, I mean, first of all, I love that because it is true that the DNA, I mean, of AI, we all know was kind of pioneered here, but the AI, what you see in the US and around the world, they're all Canadians. You were one of them.
I was, I mean, I always had a home base in Montreal, but I spent a ton of my time in Silicon Valley leading some of the AI research teams at Meta. I, you know, I also had a background as an academic, McGill University, Mila, and so on. And for years I watched all of my grad students like leave the lab in Montreal and move straight south of here. And so let me say it because Aidan won't say it. He's pretty modest, but I think it's worth saying just like how revolutionary it was to start an AI company in Toronto at the time that the three co-founders did. Like that really took a lot of conviction that it could be done and a lot of appetite for risk that a lot of young entrepreneurs don't necessarily have. And if I look at where we are today, I think it's that same spirit that is also, you know, propelling the size of this round, the size of ambition that we've put in front of investors in terms of what we intend to build with these investments. And again, that conviction that you can do that with a home base here, and that we're going to have the capital to do it, that we are going to be able to secure the compute to do it, and bring together the talent, that's something that you don't see that often.
I just want to, you know, tell Canadians who are watching, Canada made a major investment. But you are raising almost 7 billion dollars. It's a big round. Canada has invested as a country, and again, there are staged investments here, and but very importantly, about a billion six, and this, you know, you will create a thousand jobs here in Canada, you will be investing about $1.7 billion in Canadian compute, which is really the innovation and the fuel of innovation. Your headquarters are here, you have offices in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, you'll be hiring, as I say, many, many more people. You're attracting that talent. What's amazing about this is, you know, there's a lot of young people that think, how can I do this? I mean, your background is interesting just because people wonder where does this come from? Before we get to the benefits for Canada, and there's a lot. Just give people a sense. First of all, I just want people to know in the pod, you know me, I wear a suit in my job now. I never get to see Aidan in a suit because usually you got a lumber jacket on. But your background is interesting. People don't know that actually the DNA of Cohere comes from, you know, small town, tapping trees.
Yeah, yeah. No, my upbringing was in the middle of the forest in Ontario, in some small town. I think the town has, it's a collection of townships, but my specific town has maybe a couple thousand people in it. But yeah, I grew up, you know, my grandpa had built a wood cabin, a log cabin in the middle of the woods. Then my dad on the property, you've been there, you've seen it, next to that little wood cabin, built a bigger one where we lived. And yeah, every March, like when the sap started to run in the trees, we would go down and tap the trees, hang up buckets, and then my grandpa would be down there, you know, 10 hours a day just like boiling sap into syrup. I would run down from the house to hang out with him. He would tell me stories. But that's how I grew up. And by the way, there was no internet at that point. It was like, you know, the telephone wire to the house was everything. When my friends had high speed and all that stuff, I was stuck on.
So, when did you start thinking that you could build something like this?
Quite early in that small town. So I got really into computers, I think, as a product of the fact that they felt so far away, like we had such bad internet access, that type of thing. It became this just out of reach thing that I wanted to grasp onto. So I became obsessed with computers. And then in my small town, I was going through school, like elementary school, when the internet revolution was happening and businesses were digitizing and needed websites, that type of thing. So I built a little company that made websites for like the town knitting store in the town, Pilates studio. So that's what I did as my first company that I started, and it was just me. But yeah, it started early, and I think something that my parents instilled in me was ambition and like a global perspective. They're both immigrants. I was the first one in my family born in Canada. And so that gives you a lens onto the world. It lets you see beyond just our borders. And having an impact on the global stage is what Canada needs to do to remain competitive.
So that's a great segue into, because this is important. Cohere is now merged with a German company called Aleph Alpha. And so you're a Canadian headquartered company, but you also have European headquarters, which is incredible. This is a partnership, and this is a moment where Canada and the European Union are working to build closer relations for like-minded countries, to increase our ability, our choice, our sovereignty, our safety. And how important is that, building and having access to those European markets for Cohere? In the context of a world where a lot of people say there's only a few AI options out there, and yet here we are now taking control, building here, building with partnerships, why does that matter so much now, Joelle?
It's interesting, you know, I think AI is going to be so transformational that, you know, you can't just look locally, you really have to look globally, the exchange of ideas, the size of the market, and we are all living on this planet, we're all interconnected in many, many different ways. And so Cohere, I think, you know, unabashedly has the ambition to be a global AI company, a global AI player. To do that, you need the right partnerships, and it's maybe worth noting, we already had a Berlin office. We acquired a small company, Reliant AI, that was already between Montreal and Berlin, 30 people or so, that joined us earlier in 2026. And so we had sort of a, you know, a warm-up act. Obviously, you know, the merger with Aleph Alpha is much bigger, bigger teams. They're deeply integrated, have amazingly talented modeling teams, but also already a responsibility for deploying their technology in industry and in the government. So I think it's a huge opportunity for us, but it's important to do it with people who understand the culture, who speak the language, who understand the market over there to be successful.
You know, I always say if we don't build it here, we got to buy it from someone else. If we don't innovate here, we got to rent it from someone else. If we don't make the rules here, we're going to follow someone else's. Here in our AI for All strategy, you know, the trust, opportunity, sovereign control. First, we have that legislation to protect our Canadians' privacy, safe, you know, data and personal information, really important, protect our kids, and create the opportunity with our literacy program and our jobs, like all that, and creating 90,000 jobs for people in this field. This is really important. And in a sense, Cohere touches all that, building trust and creating opportunity and sovereign control. But let's just answer some basic questions that folks ask me. Okay, it's a big investment, and it's an important investment. How does this help safety? I'm worried about safety. We get these questions. Canadians are worried about their safety. I'm worried about control. I'm worried about what's happening at the frontier of AI. Is it going to have negative consequences? We see the benefits of it and we talk about that, but let's address the real concerns. How does Cohere, how does this investment, and how is what you're building to help on the safety and sovereignty and alleviate maybe some of the concerns about who controls this technology?
Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing to say is if you're not building it, you don't control it. You're not in a position to make the decisions about deployment, about safety, because someone else is controlling those decisions. And so by having a Canadian company that is in the seat of control over the technology, we as Canadians have much more influence about how that goes and how it gets deployed. We do a lot of work and invest very heavily across all aspects of safety, including things like cybersecurity. There's been a lot of stuff in the news recently about models hacking and that type of thing. We track that very closely.
Well, Cohere just tracked a Chinese model.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we track a lot of this stuff very closely and care a lot about it. Other elements like impact the labor force. We want to make sure that this goes well and that this doesn't disrupt the labor force. And so we fund research into that. We perform studies. There's pieces like bias and inclusion. So making sure that models speak the languages of the populations they're serving, ensuring that they're as useful and as effective in all these different languages, because you can have an effect where the model is really good in English and then when you start talking to it in a different language, suddenly the performance plateaus, it doesn't perform. So on all these fronts, we invest a lot, and Joelle has led a lot of that work.
I think the partnership we have with Bell is an interesting example, right? Like with them, we build specifically a model that's specialized for cybersecurity, trying to identify vulnerabilities, trying to make their systems more secure. Obviously, a number of Canadians use their services, they've chosen to use Canadian technology to have more secure systems. And now with them coming in as an investor, you know, which is really like the longer-term partnership that we're looking for. So I think we expect to see a lot more. We've invested a lot in terms of building security into our models and into the product that we build.
