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

Listen to this episode from Unsupervised Learning on Spotify. 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