Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

September 1, 2025

Duration

1h 14m

Channel

The Twenty Minute VC

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Nick Frosst is a Canadian AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as co-founder of Cohere, the enterprise-focused LLM. Cohere has raised over $900 million, most recently a $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. Under his leadership, Cohere hit $100M in ARR. Prior to founding Cohere, Nick was a researcher at Google Brain and a protégé of Geoffrey Hinton. ---------------------------------------------- In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 00:50 Biggest lessons from Geoff Hinton at Google Brain? 02:14 Did Google completely sleep at the wheel and miss ChatGPT? 05:41 Is data or compute the real bottleneck in AI’s future? 07:16 Does GPT5 Prove That Scaling Laws are BS? 15:47 Are AI benchmarks just total BS? 22:01 Would Cohere spend $5M on a single AI researcher? 32:59 Open vs Closed AI Models 36:01 Future of Prompting 38:43 Lessons from a $600M Fundraise 42:11 How do Cohere compete with OpenAI and Anthropic’s billions? 46:17 Do Enterprise Companies Trade at Lower Multiples? 56:15 Should countries fund their own models? Is model sovereignty the future? 01:05:12 Why has Sam Altman actually done a disservice to AI? ----------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on X: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Nick Frosst on X: https://twitter.com/nickfrosst Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #nickfrosst #founder #cohere #chatgpt5 #anthropic #europe #aimodels

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Nick Frosst

  guest

• Harry Stebbings

  host

• Narrator

  other

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, featuring Nick Frosst and Harry Stebbings, Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice explores cohere’s Nick Frosst: Pragmatic AI, Enterprise Focus, Not AGI Hype Nick Frosst, cofounder of Cohere and former first hire in Geoff Hinton’s Google Brain group, argues that today’s LLMs are transformative for work but fundamentally not a path to AGI as popularly described. He strongly criticizes Sam Altman’s and others’ rhetoric about near‑term existential risk as academically disingenuous and harmful to productive AI discourse and policy. Frosst explains Cohere’s strategy: tightly focused on enterprise use cases, efficient, small-footprint models, and agentic systems that operate safely on internal tools and data, rather than broad consumer products. He also explores talent wars, regulation, open vs. closed models, sovereignty, labor displacement, and why Cohere is betting on long‑lived, infrastructure‑like enterprise AI rather than hype-driven AGI narratives.

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