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Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice
20VC with Harry Stebbings· 2025-09-01 14:03
Company Focus & Strategy - Cohere is uniquely focused on bringing large language model (LLM) technology to enterprise, training models for enterprise tool use and API integration within businesses [1] - Cohere trains efficient models that can fit on two GPUs, aiming for a balance between performance, cost, and accessibility for enterprise deployment [1] - Cohere prioritizes Return on Investment (ROI) over Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), focusing on helping enterprises achieve practical AI deployments [14] Model Training & Data - While the transformer architecture remains largely unchanged, Cohere focuses on refining training methods, including the use of synthetic data to augment real-world data [1] - Data quality remains a bottleneck, requiring a combination of real-world and synthetic data, with in-house annotators creating real data [1] - Cohere releases model weights for non-commercial usage, aiming to build credibility within the research community while maintaining a commercial business model [10] Competition & Market - Cohere differentiates itself from consumer-focused companies like OpenAI and Anthropic by concentrating on enterprise solutions and knowledge worker augmentation [14] - The company views being Canadian as an asset, attracting companies interested in working with non-American tech companies due to geopolitical considerations [18] - Cohere believes that benchmarks are not always an accurate reflection of the utility value of models, as they can be gamified and may not align with enterprise use cases [4] Talent & Workforce - Cohere acknowledges the war for AI talent but emphasizes the importance of stability, purpose, and value alignment in attracting and retaining employees [5] - The company believes that LLMs will augment human work, automating boring tasks and allowing people to focus on creativity, communication, and strategic thinking [8] - Cohere foresees changes to the workforce similar to those brought about by previous technological revolutions, emphasizing the need for policies to ensure a smooth transition and address income inequality [8][9] Future Predictions - By 2026, Cohere predicts that users will be able to use language to interact with computers to automate tasks like filing expenses [21] - The company believes that the skill of prompting will become less relevant as language models are trained to better fit how people expect them to work [12] - Cohere anticipates that language will become a more important part of how people interact with computers, though graphic user interfaces will still be valuable [18]