Aidan Gomez is Google In 2017, he wrote an article for Brain magazine,All it takes is attention“This is the paper that conceptualized Transformers and ultimately sparked the boom in generative artificial intelligence.
“Nobody working in this field at the time could have foreseen where we are now in terms of technological capabilities,” Gomez told CNBC in a recent interview. “The model is executing on what I personally thought we would see at the end of our careers, maybe 40 years from now.”
Gomez, who was studying computer science at the University of Toronto at the time of his internship, left Google in 2021 to co-found AI startup Cohere. NVIDIA and Reportedly The company raised funding at a $5 billion valuation. Cohere creates generative AI models that businesses can use, as opposed to consumer-facing products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Cohere co-founders Aidan Gomez, Ivan Chan, and Nick Frost out with colleagues
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“There are studies coming out of MIT and Harvard that show productivity gains,” Gomez says, “that you can quantitatively measure. You sit knowledge workers in one of these models and train them how to use it and how to make it work for them. They have to learn how to use the technology, but once they do, they’re about 40 percent more productive.”
In June 2023, Cohere raised $270 million at a valuation of $2.2 billion from investors including Salesforce and Oracle. Cohere executives also attended an AI forum at the White House.
Until recently, “everything we’ve done has been done with about five people,” Gomez said. Today, Cohere has about 400 employees and a rapidly expanding sales team.
Asked about specific use cases for how generative AI can benefit a company’s bottom line, Gomez pointed to a model Cohere has built to help insurance companies: When mining or pipeline companies send out requests for proposals, the technology allows insurers to submit quotes faster, ahead of their competitors.
Gomez called it a race.
“The first insurer to submit a reasonable bid will win the contract,” he said. “We have strengthened our actuaries’ resources to study projects, assess risks and prepare estimates.”
Gomez said that by speeding up the actuaries’ work, the company is able to win more business.
“I never thought an insurance company that deals with natural resource projects would adopt large-scale language models,” he says, “but they’re doing it.”
To hear the full conversation between CNBC’s Steve Kovach and Aidan Gomez, watch the video.
