Cohere AI Chronicle — Challenging Tech Giants With AI For All

This is our fifth edition of Unicorn Chronicles (#1 OpenAI, #2 Anthropic, #3 Inflection, #4 Hugging Face), focusing on generative AI unicorns. Today, we’re exploring Cohere, which lost two positions in the ranking of AI unicorns after the sudden rise of Hugging Face and Inflection.

Now, Cohere is #5, but does it mean the company loses its position in the market? Let's dive deeper and discover more about the birth of Cohere, its mission, financial situation, main products, and other crucial details! Things are not as simple as it seems.

1. The starting point - Attention and a Dropout is All You Need

2. Mission of the company and its founders

3. Financial situation

4. What Cohere offers and their tech specs

5. How does Cohere make money?

6. Bonus: All important links about the founders

The starting point - Attention and a Dropout is All You Need

Co-founder of Cohere Aidan Gomez started his career as a Machine Learning Intern at Venture Media, where his work revolved around tackling real-time audio and sheet-music alignment using recurrent neural networks on mobile devices. Following this, Gomez made several career moves, first at Microsoft and then at Google Brain, where he crossed paths with Lukasz Kaiser. Together, they collaborated on the development of multi-modal networks, capable of addressing eight distinct problems spanning the realms of vision, audio, and language.

The camaraderie between Gomez and Kaiser endured even after Gomez transitioned to the University of Toronto in early 2017. This enduring partnership culminated in the publication of the renowned "Attention Is All You Need" paper, co-authored by Gomez, Kaiser, and six other researchers from Google Brain. In the comments accompanying the paper, it is noted that “Lukasz and Aidan spent countless long days designing various parts of and implementing tensor2tensor, replacing our earlier codebase, greatly improving results and massively accelerating our research.” Interestingly, Kaiser made the move from the Google Brain team to OpenAI, which happened to be one of Cohere's main competitors, in the same year that Cohere secured its inaugural funding round.

Meanwhile, after his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, the second co-founder Nick Frosst became the first employee at Google Brain’s Toronto lab, led by Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called 'the godfather of AI’. Frosst's tenure at the lab spanned from 2016 to 2020, and it was during this time that he met Aidan Gomez.

The third co-founder, Ivan Zhang, provided insight into his journey and the genesis of the company in a podcast hosted by Madrona. Zhang decided to leave the university as he said “to get my hands on the technology to learn.” He dropped out of school to work at his friend’s startup and then he met Aiden Gomez who wanted to do an indie research group. This is when the match happened between Zhang's personality who thought that “it would be pretty badass to publish papers as a dropout” and Gomez’s idea. They both wanted to be independent.

This is how For.ai started in 2017, as described on their website: "a team of friends, classmates, and engineers started a distributed research collaboration, with a focus on creating a medium for early-career AI enthusiasts to engage with experienced researchers." At that time, For AI stood as one of the pioneering community-driven research groups supporting independent researchers across the globe.

In 2019, Zhang suggested to Aidan the idea of starting a new venture together as they both learned so much and got experience at For.ai. Even in 2019, there weren't many firms that used deep learning while Gomez experienced the proliferation of the new, powerful thing called transformers at Google. Zhang shared their experience at that time:

By the time GPT-2 went out, Zhang and Aiden noticed how powerful these transformers could be and also witnessed their architectural change when they became decoder-only meaning these models could write.

That’s how Cohere was born.

Mission of the company and its founders

In 2019 tech giants who actively developed new ideas and implemented them in their products remained the leaders of the market. But Cohere became an exception. What started as pure enthusiasm has become a product that competes with other NLP model providers, the tech giants.

At the same time, Cohere reaffirms that they also work on making this technology secure for the users mitigating the biases that could be presented in the data LLMs are trained on. The topic gained substantial traction after Google showed the exit door to AI researcher Timnit Gebru and a few more researchers when they started to point out such pitfalls of LLMs.

Financial situation