I was 20 years old when I co-authored Attention Is All You Need. I didn't fully understand what we'd built. Nobody did. It took five years for the world to catch up.
OpenAI wants to be the AI. We want to be the AI that enterprises actually trust with their data. Those are two very different companies.
We let companies run our models on their own infrastructure. Their data never leaves their servers. In regulated industries, that's not a feature — it's the only option.
I'm Canadian. Nick is Canadian. We built Cohere in Toronto. Everyone assumed we'd move to San Francisco. We didn't. Toronto has the talent. The Valley has the hype. We chose talent.
The Transformer paper had eight authors. Three of us started AI companies. That might be the highest founder-per-paper ratio in history.
ChatGPT is a consumer product. It's impressive. But enterprise AI is a completely different game. Banks don't want a chatbot that hallucinates their compliance policies.