Aidan Gomez was an intern at Google Brain in 2017, when he helped co-author the “Attention is All You Need” paper that introduced the Transformer concept and ultimately started the generative boom in artificial intelligence.
“There is no one working in the field right now who can predict where we are in terms of technological capability,” Gomez told CNBC in a recent interview. “Models are doing things that I personally thought I would probably see 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 reportedly valued at $5 billion. But the money has been collected. Cohere builds generative AI models that companies can use, unlike consumer-facing products like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Coheir co-founders Aidan Gomez, Evan Zhang and Nick Frost out with colleagues
Coher
“We have research coming out of MIT and Harvard that shows productivity benefits,” Gomez said. “You can only quantitatively measure it. You sit a knowledge worker with one of these models. You train them how to use it, how to make it work for them. They have to learn how to use the technology, but once they do, you see productivity lifts that are like 40 percent.”
In June 2023, Cohere raised $270 million at a $2.2 billion valuation from investors including Salesforce and Oracle. Cohere executives have also attended AI forums at the White House.
Until recently, “everything to date has been done with five people,” Gomez said. Cohere now has about 400 people and is rapidly growing its sales team.
When asked about specific use cases where generative AI could benefit a company's bottom line, Gomez cited a model Coheir created to help an insurance company. When asked for a proposal by a mining or pipeline firm, the technology allows the company to collect prices faster to beat the competition.
Gomez called it a race.
“The first insurance provider that puts a reasonable bid in front of them wins the contract,” he said. “We extended their actors, the people who are researching the project, assessing the risk, coming up with a quote.”
By ramping up the actuary, Gomez said the business has been able to win more contracts.
“I never thought an insurance company would adopt big language models for natural resource projects,” he said. “But they are.”
Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC's Steve Kovacs and Aidan Gomez.