20VC: Cohere Founder on How Cohere Compete with OpenAI and Anthropic $BNs | Why Counties Should Fund Their Own Models & the Need for Model Sovereignty | How Sam Altman Has Done a Disservice to AI with Nick Frosst
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I don't think Sam Aldman has done a service to the world by talking about how close AGI is. I think he has made several predictions now that are wrong, and that were obviously wrong at the time he made them. AI is gonna kill the whole world in two years. He did a world tour where he spoke to every major leader the world over to tell them, hey, This technology is gonna poses an existential threat.
And I think that was academically disingenuous, and I think did a disservice to the technology he loves. A lot of the world does not think scaling laws are super prevalent. This is 20VC with me, Harry Sebings, and today we are joined by Nick Frost, Canadian AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of Cohere, the enterprise focused LLM, who has raised over $900 million, most recently raising a $500 million round, bringing their valuation to 6.8 billion. Today we discuss how on earth they compete when competing against the billions of dollars that OpenAI and Anthropic have.
Kohere has hit 100 million in enterprise ARR and before founding Kohir, Nick was a researcher at Google Brain alongside the incredible Jeff Hinton. But before we dive into the show today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products, and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page, offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets. Coda facilitates
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