Aidan Gomez, CEO & Co-Founder, Cohere and Moderator Barbara Carfagna, Journalist & Anchor, RAI discusses about the Economic Sovereignty and Technological control
What Aidan Gomez said
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Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, reflected on the Transformer's unexpected evolution from a translation tool to the backbone of modern AI, noting its 10-year anniversary next year and his disappointment that no architecture has surpassed it. He argued that AI is becoming fundamental infrastructure across all industries, making sovereign AI essential to prevent foreign control over critical systems. Cohere's approach involves deploying its models and software stack directly to customers, often through domestic champions like Stackit or Deutsche Telekom, ensuring full control and data privacy. He cited the Cohere-Aleph Alpha merger as a blueprint for international alliances, emphasizing partnerships over full-stack reinvention. Gomez advocated for Europe to shift from regulation to innovation and address capital concentration to fund frontier AI projects, while framing sovereignty as diversification rather than decoupling.
Key takeaways
Gomez said the Transformer's 10-year anniversary is next year and no architecture has beaten it, which he finds disappointing as a scientist.
Cohere deploys its models and software stack to customers, giving them full control and preventing Cohere from seeing or switching off the technology.
The Cohere-Aleph Alpha merger is a blueprint for sovereign AI alliances, with partnerships announced in Spain and open to Italy and others.
Europe must shift from regulation to innovation and solve capital concentration to fund frontier AI projects.
Hi everybody. So, Aidan Gomez, you co-authored the Transformer paper that made today's generative AI possible. Looking back, did you imagine it would become not just a scientific breakthrough or just a tool, but a geopolitical infrastructure?
Yeah, no, definitely not. I don't think any of us who were working on that project had any idea what was going to come of it. At the time when we were at Google, we were building it for just the translation system, and so we were focused on a very narrow slice of the problem. But I think it took us all by surprise what the community did with the technology. We built it for translation, but then suddenly there were applications into language modeling and all these other different areas — and at this point images, video, audio. It's been extraordinary to see, and I think next year it will be the 10-year anniversary of the Transformer.
I was close to a baby. But it'll be the 10-year anniversary and still we're using Transformers. Still, they're the backbone of every language model, whether it's our own, GPT, etc. So that, for me as a scientist, is a bit disappointing, right? As a good scientist, you want to create something important, but then you want to see someone else come and build on that work and beat it. And that hasn't happened for 10 years. So I'm very excited about what comes next.
So, what comes next? You are building what comes next. Cohere has chosen the enterprise and sovereign AI path rather than the consumer chatbot race. It's the real future of AI. Sorry. No, no. Is this the future of AI more embedded inside companies, governments, and critical processes?
Absolutely. It's going to become fundamental infrastructure to every vertical. Obviously, intelligence is the most general and widely applicable function that exists in human society. It's in every single vertical. And I think AI technology first took off in the consumer space. We saw ChatGPT blow up. Then it started to take off in coding. And now what we're seeing is in enterprises mass adoption. That also means a lot of spend and sometimes even overspend — we've seen some stories around that. But more and more this is going to get integrated into the critical industries that power an economy. And so that's why sovereignty is so significant right now. Before it gets deployed into water treatment facilities, financial institutions, health care, etc., we need to ensure that we don't have third parties or foreign governments with the ability to just switch off critical infrastructure. And so that's what we at Cohere have been very focused on — ensuring that there is that resilience, that we're able to offer countries, governments, and their industry the ability to have a fully sovereign stack that they own and control.
Yeah, well, I've gotten excited a number of times. Like there were a number of research papers that came out that suggested, oh, maybe we can beat the transformer in this way — we'll make it more efficient on long sequences, for example, or instead of generating just one word at a time, we'll generate a bunch of words at a time. There were these ideas that emerged, and I got super excited. I spun up teams inside of Cohere focused on researching those, testing those. And then I like to call the Transformer a great artist because it steals. It steals ideas. So the Transformer just copied the ideas that emerged in these papers, integrated it into itself. And it's still what we use. So I don't know what comes next. I've gotten excited and disappointed a couple times.
Meanwhile, Europe is increasingly worried about dependence on American and Chinese AI platforms. In your opinion, can sovereign AI be a real industrial strategy, or is it just a defensive reaction to a technology already dominated by a few giants? For example, you acquired Aleph Alpha and opened in Paris. So, you believe that there could be a sovereign AI for Europe?
11 more exchanges in this transcript
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Gomez, A. (2026, June 19). Reimagining Sovereign AI with Aidan Gomez | FII Priority ROME 2026 DAY2 [Interview transcript]. FII Institute. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/994238/
MLA
Aidan Gomez. "Reimagining Sovereign AI with Aidan Gomez | FII Priority ROME 2026 DAY2." FII Institute, 19 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/994238/.
BibTeX
@misc{gomez2026_994238,
author = {Aidan Gomez},
title = {Reimagining Sovereign AI with Aidan Gomez | FII Priority ROME 2026 DAY2},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, FII Institute. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/994238/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
