Aidan Gomez was an intern at Google Brin first founded the project in 2017, when he helped author a research paper called “Attention Is All You Need” that laid out the concept of the Transformer and ultimately launched the generative AI boom.
“There was no one in the field working at the time who could have predicted the technological capabilities that we have,” Gomez told CNBC in a recent interview. “The models are doing things that I personally thought I would probably see by the end of my career, maybe 40 years from now.”
Gomes, who was a computer science student at the University of Toronto at the time of his internship, left Google in 2021 to co-found Cohere, an AI startup backed by Nvidia The company has reportedly raised $5 billion. Cohere makes generative AI models that businesses can use, in contrast to consumer-oriented products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Cohere co-founders Aidan Gomez, Evan Chang, and Nick Frost with colleagues
cohere
“MIT and Harvard have published research showing productivity gains,” Gomez says. “You can quantify it. You can sit a knowledge worker down next to one of these models. You train them on how to use it, how to make it work for them. They have to learn how to use the technology, but once they do, you see a 40 percent increase in productivity.”
In June 2023, Cohere raised $270 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, from investors including Salesforce and Oracle. Cohere executives have even attended White House AI forums.
Until recently, “everything was done by just five people,” Gomez said. Cohere now has about 400 people and is seeing rapid growth in its sales team.
When asked about specific use cases where generative AI could benefit a company’s bottom line, Gomez cited a model Cohere built to help an insurance company. The technology allows the company to bid faster to beat out competition when there’s a request to bid from a mining or pipeline company.
Gomez described it as a race.
“The first insurance company that comes up with a reasonable offer wins the contract,” he said. “We’ve beefed up our actuaries, the people who research the project, assess the risks, and come up with a quote.”
Gomez said the company was able to win more contracts thanks to the acceleration of the insurance process.
“I never imagined that a natural resource insurance company would adopt large language models, but they did,” he said.
Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC's Steve Kovac and Aidan Gomez.
