Aidan Gomez was an intern at Google Brain in 2017, when he helped co-author the “Attention Is All You Need” paper that conceptualized the transformer and eventually kicked off the generative artificial intelligence boom.
“There isn’t any one in the sphere who was around back then working who could have foreseen where we’re when it comes to technological capability,” Gomez told CNBC in a recent interview. “The models are doing stuff that I personally thought perhaps I’d see at the top of my profession, perhaps in like 40 years.”
Gomez, who was a pc science student on the University of Toronto on the time of his internship, left Google in 2021 to co-found Cohere, an AI startup that is backed by Nvidia and has reportedly raised money at a $5 billion valuation. Cohere makes generative AI models that will be utilized by firms, in contrast to consumer-facing products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Cohere Co-Founders Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst out with colleagues
Cohere
“We’re having research come out of MIT and Harvard showing the productivity gains,” Gomez said. “You’ll be able to just quantitatively measure it. You sit a knowledge employee down next to one among these models. You train them on the best way to use it, the best way to make it useful for them. They should learn the best way to use the technology, but once they do, you see productivity lifts which are like 40%.”
In June 2023, Cohere raised $270 million at a $2.2 billion valuation, from investors including Salesforce and Oracle. Cohere executives have even attended AI forums on the White House.
Gomez said that until recently, “Every thing up to now has been done with like five people.” Cohere now has about 400 people and is rapidly growing its sales team.
When asked about specific use cases where generative AI can profit an organization’s bottom line, Gomez cited a model Cohere built to assist an insurer. The technology allows the corporate to submit faster quotes to beat out the competition when there is a request for proposal from a mining or pipeline firm.
Gomez called it a race.
“The primary insurance provider that puts an affordable bid in front of them wins that contract,” he said. “We augmented their actuaries, the parents who’re doing the research on the project, assessing the chance, coming up with a quote.”
By speeding up the actuaries, Gomez said the business was capable of win more contracts.
“I never thought that an insurance company for natural resource projects could be adopting large language models,” he said. “But they’re.”
Watch the video to listen to the total conversation between CNBC’s Steve Kovach and Aidan Gomez.
