A Cohere Founder on What A.I. Critics Get Wrong

Last week, Mark Carney announced his big A.I. strategy. Two billion dollars to support creating jobs, providing free A.I. literacy training, and protection against some of the potential harms and risks around A.I., especially with kids. Oh, and he wants to build a world-leading supercomputer. Canada's leading A.I. company is Cohere. Cohere isn't like OpenAI or xAI or Anthropic or any of those other well-known large language model companies. They're not public facing. They don't do image generation or music generation, or tell you what recipe you can make with the leftovers in your fridge. They develop private models for specific companies trained in part on that company's private data. RBC, Bell, Salesforce, just to name a few. Their current valuation sits at $7 billion. Cohere's co-founder is a 33 year-old indie rockstar named Nick Frosst. He joins host Stephen Marche to discuss Canada's A.I. sector, his band, Star Trek, and those students booing A.I. at convocations.Host: Stephen MarcheCredits: Tristan Capacchione (Producer), Bruce Thorson (Senior Producer), max collins (Director of Audio), Jesse Brown (Editor and Publisher)Fact checking by Julian AbrahamPhoto: Gabriel HutchinsonAdditional music by: Audio NetworkSponsors: Fizz: Visit https://fizz.ca and activate a first plan using the referral code CAN25 to get 40$ off and 10GB of free data.Douglas: Douglas is giving our listeners a FREE Sleep Bundle with each mattress purchase. Get the sheets, pillows, mattress and pillow protectors FREE with your Douglas purchase today. Visit https://douglas.ca/canadaland to claim this offer.Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at https://shopify.caArticle: Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit https://article.com/canadaland and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout.Can’t get enough Canadaland? Follow @Canadaland_Podcasts on Instagram for clips, announcements, explainers and more.If you value this podcast, support us! You’ll get premium access to all our shows ad free, including early releases and bonus content. You’ll also get our exclusive newsletter, discounts on merch at our store, tickets to our live and virtual events, and more than anything, you’ll be a part of the solution to Canada’s journalism crisis, you’ll be keeping our work free and accessible to everybody. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.