Aidan Gomez was an intern at Google Brain in 2017 when he co-authored the “Attention is all you need” article that conceived the transformer and ultimately sparked the generative artificial intelligence boom.
“There's no one in this field who was working back then who could have predicted where we would be in terms of technological capabilities,” Gomez said in a recent interview with CNBC. “The models are doing things that I personally thought I would see maybe at the end of my career, maybe in 40 years.”
Gomez, who was a computer science student at the University of Toronto at the time of his internship, left Google in 2021 to co-found Cohere, an AI startup backed by NVIDIA and has According to reports raised money at a $5 billion valuation. Cohere creates generative AI models that can be used by businesses, as opposed to consumer-focused products like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
“We have research from MIT and Harvard that shows the productivity gains,” Gomez said. “It's easy to measure quantitatively. You put a knowledge worker next to one of these models. You teach them how to use it and how to make it work for them. They have to learn how to use the technology, but when they do that, you see productivity gains of about 40%.”
In June 2023, Cohere raised $270 million from investors including Salesforce and Oracle at a $2.2 billion valuation. Cohere executives even participated in AI forums at the White House.
Gomez said that until recently, “everything was done with about five people.” Cohere now employs about 400 people and is rapidly expanding its sales team.
When asked about specific use cases where generative AI can improve an organization's bottom line, Gomez pointed to a model Cohere developed to assist an insurer. The technology allows the corporate to submit bids faster, helping it stand out from the competition when a mining or pipeline company requests a bid.
Gomez called it a race.
“The first insurer that makes them an affordable offer will win the contract,” he said. “We have supported their actuaries, the individuals who research the project, assess the chance and put together a bid.”
By speeding up the actuaries, the company has been able to land more orders, said Gomez.
“I never thought a commodity insurance company would adopt large language models,” he said. “But they do.”
Watch the video to listen to the complete conversation between CNBC's Steve Kovach and Aidan Gomez.
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