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

I don't think Sam Altman 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. I think AI will probably lead to the end of the world. You know, he's made allusions to things. He did a world tour where he spoke to every major leader, the world over, to tell them, "Hey, this technology is gonna pose as an existential threat." And I think that was academically disingenuous, and I think did a disservice to the technology he loves.

Ready to go? Nick, I'm so excited for this, dude. When I had Aidan on the show-

Mm-hmm.

... he was like, "You've gotta have Nick on. He's the real star of the show." And he introduced us way back then.

Mm-hmm. Hmm.

So, I'm so excited that we could make this happen.

Yeah, man. I'm happy to be here.

Now, before we dive into Cohere, I have to ask, you were Geoff Hinton's first hire at Google Brain.

Mm-hmm.

And so then you're put in a room with Geoff Hinton. You get to work with him every day. What was the biggest lesson from working with Geoff, a legend of the industry?

Yeah. I, I learned... Yeah. I, I loved working with Geoff. Um, I learned everything I know about research, um, from those, those... I think we were there for four years, three years? Um, I think I was very surprised at how creatively and playfully he approaches research. Um, when we would discuss, like, algorithms or, or, or, like, optimizers or, or, uh, loss functions, we would discuss them often in, like, through physical analogy. So, we'd spend a lot of time talking about, like, imagine there's like a ball here and like an elastic band to this thing, and a pulley here, and like this is what the... you know, it's on this kind of a surface. And like a lot of it was descriptions in the natural physical world. And that was very, yeah, like playful. And a lot of it was approached with like, "Oh, what would happen if..." You know, with, with curiosity. Um, and I didn't ex-... Uh, when working with him, I didn't expect that. Um, I expected hi- it to be much more like, you know, just, "Here's the equation. Let's, let's figure out what the derivative is and let's, let's go from there." Whereas instead, a lot of it's based on like intuition.

When you look at Google Brain and you look at DeepMind, a lot think that really kind of Google were asleep at the wheel, given them not being at the forefront in what was the consumerization of it with ChatGPT.

Mm-hmm.

Do you think that's fair?

I don't know. I mean, uh, it's certainly interesting. Look, like the transformer was invented at Google, right? Like, there was... Uh, in 2017, Aidan, uh, um, amongst with, um, many other brilliant people in Google Brain published the transformer as an architecture. Um, it wasn't, it wasn't then commercialized very quickly within Google. It wasn't scaled up very quickly within Google. Um, a lot of that work had to be done elsewhere and years later. So, that's interesting. And like w- why that is, like what, what, what systems are in place to make that be the case? I, I don't know. I, I, I will say there's still a ton of brilliant people in DeepMind, I think, now. It's, it's just cons- sub- subsumed the rest of it. Doing great work, um, and they continue to make good products. Uh, it is interesting that all the people who worked on the transformer left to continue to work on the transformer.