A major player in AI is likely raising a lot of money to bring AI to the enterprise.
Cohere is a big player in the world of AI, but the company flies under the radar. Founded in 2019 by ex-researchers at Alphabet, Cohere builds large language models. These models can help enterprises use a range of language-related AI superpowers.
The company is now in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Reuters. That would value it at $6 billion. And, it's already raised $170 million from VCs and AI leaders like Geoff Hinton and Fei-Fei Li.
Notably, the company has a stated focus of building real-world AI tech for the enterprise.
In Episode 34 of the Marketing AI Show, Marketing AI Institute founder/CEO Paul Roetzer talked to me about why the announcement matters.
One of Cohere’s investors, Geoff Hinton, is one of the godfathers of modern AI. Previously heavily involved in AI at Google, anything Hinton touches is worth paying attention to, says Roetzer.
Cohere’s CEO, Aiden Gomez, was also a key researcher at Google, with his name on one of the most important papers in AI: the paper introducing the concept of “transformers,” which make today’s large language models possible.
Today, there are only a relative handful of companies that build foundational models, like the large language models that power many of the AI tools we see today. Outside of this club, almost every other AI company builds on top of these models through APIs.
Cohere is one of the foundational companies and, as such, is well worth keeping an eye on, says Roetzer.
When you look at Cohere’s pedigree and technology, their focus on the enterprise becomes much, much more significant.
“I believe the near future for enterprises is going to be custom-training models on their data,” says Roetzer.
That means training a model like GPT-3 on the corpus of knowledge specific to your organization. In the near future, you might train a model to use your content, your CRM, and your proprietary data sources in ways that dramatically accelerate your organization.
Foundational model companies like Cohere will be absolutely critical to doing that. And Cohere seems to be heading up the value chain, right to the top of the enterprise, first.
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