Humans
behind AI
Aidan Gomez
Co-founder and CEO, Cohere
Toronto, Canada
Aidan Gomez
Co-founder and CEO, Cohere
Toronto, Canada
The steam engine took the physical load off our backs. AI will do the same for cognitive load.
I’ve always been interested in that idea of ‘if we can build it, we understand it’. If we can build artificial intelligence, we understand how intelligence emerges, we can start from scratch and build it ourselves. That’s what pushed me towards it. One thing led to another, I went to Google and then I started Cohere. The past year has been a gratifying experience watching people wake up to this technology and appreciate it. I'm very grateful that people see what I see, that AI is magical to them too.
I grew up in a 150-acre forest in rural Ontario. We would go down to the stream that ran through our property and collect water samples, put them under a microscope and look at the bacteria swimming around.
We didn’t have a TV. When we got internet, we couldn’t get high speed because of where we lived so it was dial-up with that horrible noise and it was so slow you could watch pictures load pixel-by-pixel. Because it was largely out of reach, the internet was a special, magical thing that others had access to, but I could only glimpse at.
That scarcity drove me. I would try to squeeze performance out of computers, make them faster, make my internet work a little bit better. It forced me to understand the tech.
My parents gave me a passion for learning, it's their nature: they’ve never stopped exploring and teaching. My mom is British. She studied dance at uni and became a librarian when she moved to Canada, so she always had me reading and writing, painting, and playing piano.
My dad is Spanish and was a math and physics high school teacher. He would constantly show me journal articles about what MIT and Oxford were doing. He’s in his seventies now and still sends me articles.
I realized I loved programming in high school. You have these projects that are just pieces, and slowly over days, weeks, months, it refines and comes together. It’s almost like being a metalworker hammering out something. I think it's the same satisfaction of creation.
In grade 10, when I was 15, I started a company. At the time, all the small businesses in my village were getting a website, so the knitting shop and the family insurance provider wanted an online presence. For $500, I would build them a website and manage it. I handed some of the clients to my younger brother, who’s also a programmer, but they still check in on me and send me sweet notes saying how proud they are.
I studied computer science at The University of Toronto and did a PhD at Oxford. For me, artificial intelligence (AI) is the last mystery of science. We understand our physical world so well, yet intelligence and consciousness are a total mystery. There’s a path from the physical interaction of atoms to being a thinking, feeling thing—and we know so little about it.
I describe our model as Cohere’s collective child. Every day, we're talking to it, you teach it about the stuff you care about, that you're an expert in. And it gradually gets smarter.
There are moments where the model surprises us, and shows deep understanding or capabilities. It might draw a beautiful analogy when we’re interacting with it. And you'll take a screenshot and share it—like, ‘How did it do that?’ That steady progress is what's most rewarding.
Over the next five years, I think we’ll be able to automate any human task that we decide we don’t want to do. Just as the steam engine took the physical load off our backs, AI will do the same for the cognitive load.
It's a powerful technology, it can speak to you, so it can be used both for profound good and profound bad. Of course, we need to protect against the downsides, but enable and accelerate the upsides. There's a rational, correct middle ground to take, and the benefits dramatically outweigh the risks.
Misinformation does worry me. We're in a really unique time. There are a lot of really regressive forces at play globally, and AI could be a very helpful tool in stoking that and shifting the narrative further in their favor, so I'm doing everything I can to prevent that.
It means collaborating with our partners, like QuantumBlack, to make sure the outputs of our models are safe, and to ensure they don’t fall into the wrong hands.
It's an immense responsibility. But I'm optimistic or else I wouldn't be doing this.
Work can be intense. I’m normally in meetings all day—but sometimes I get to work out for an hour. I moved all the mops and buckets out of a closet and put in a bench and weights. My best days are the ones where I get to hang out with the team and find out what they're working on.
I’m happiest when we discover something. For every one time you succeed, you fail relentlessly. The reason why so many PhD students and postdocs are so depressed is because it's such a hard thing to do. You relentlessly try and fail and try and fail. But then occasionally, you don't fail. You succeed—and that is the most rewarding feeling. You have some insight. You contribute something truly new to the world.
I’m an extrovert by rigorous training, practice, and experience. One of the hardest things about having a life where all you do is talk and meet people is not having silent time alone to just sit. It’s outside my nature to talk, but it's part of my job so I do it.
One of my favorite places in downtown Toronto is a tiny farm in the middle of a park. There are pigs and goats, sheep and cows, and a couple of horses. And it’s close to my girlfriend’s place. On the weekends, we wake up, grab coffee, pet the animals, and hang out. It feels like I’m back home because I grew up in the woods, surrounded by farmland. It's somehow familiar and warm.
I don’t go home as often as I’d like, I’m constantly flying. But every year, I need to go home and just be with family in the woods.
Aidan's photos were taken in Toronto, Canada.
I’m doing everything I can to prevent regressive forces using AI to shift the narrative in their favor.
Read more of our stories
Paul Beaumont
Tiffany Kwok
Mara Pometti
Sanjay Hariharan
Rory Walsh
