Ep 62: CEO of Cohere Aidan Gomez on Scaling Limits Emerging, AI Use-cases with PMF & Life After Transformers

Aidan joined this week’s Unsupervised Learning for a wide-ranging conversation on model architectures, enterprise adoption, and what’s breaking in the foundation model stack. 

If you’re building or investing in AI infrastructure, Aidan is worth listening to. He co-authored the original Transformer paper, leads one of the most advanced model labs outside of the hyperscalers, and is now building for real-world enterprise deployment with Cohere’s agent platform, North. Cohere serves thousands of customers across sectors like finance, telco, and healthcare — and they’ve made a name for themselves by staying model-agnostic, privacy-forward, and deeply international (with major bets in Japan and Korea)

(0:00) Intro
(0:32) Enterprise AI
(3:23) Custom Integrations and Future of AI Agents
(4:33) Enterprise Use Cases for Gen AI
(7:02) The Importance of Reasoning in AI Models
(10:38) Custom Models and Synthetic Data
(17:48) Cohere's Approach to AI Applications
(23:24) Future Use Cases and Market Fit
(27:11) Building a Unified Automation Platform
(27:34) Strategic Decisions in the AI Journey
(29:19) International Partnerships and Language Models
(31:05) Future of Foundation Models
(32:27) AI in Specialized Domains
(34:40) Challenges in Data Integration
(35:06) Emerging Foundation Model Companies
(35:31) Technological Frontiers and Architectures
(37:29) Scaling Hypothesis and Model Capabilities
(42:26) AI Research Culture and Team Building
(44:39) Future of AI and Societal Impact
(48:31) Addressing AI Risks

With your co-hosts:  

@jacobeffron  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  

@patrickachase  

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  

@ericabrescia  

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  

@jordan_segall  

- Partner at Redpoint