Aidan Gomez is the co-founder and CEO of Cohere, a leading AI company focused on enterprise applications. Not only is he a major figure in the current generative AI landscape, but he was also one of its instigators. At only 20, as an intern at Google, Aidan co-authored the 2017 “Attention is all you need” paper, which introduced transformer technology to the world — yes, the “T” in GPT, the AI architecture taking the world by storm.
Some of the questions Aidan and I discuss:
How organisations are taking their large language models from proof of concept to useful application
Why LLMs’ real value lies in their integration into larger systems rather than isolated use
Why Aidan thinks that AI will augment, not displace the workforce
Lessons from the Air Canada chatbot scandal
Aidan’s thinking on the role AI plays in reinforcing existing market dominance — and long-term innovation potential.
Want to sponsor an episode of my podcast? Let’s discuss!
00:00 Introduction
03:04 The origins of the transformer paper “Attention is all you need”
11:05 Enterprises and large language models (LLMs)
30:22 Reliability and trust in LLMs
39:58 Components and infrastructure of LLM implementations
45:31 Performance improvements from LLMs
48:41 Impact on competitive dynamics
51:30 Augmenting, not displacing, human workers
57:00 Building apps with LLMs
01:00:32 Overcoming fear and nervousness around AI
01:05:55 The future of LLM architectures
01:08:30 Balancing level-headedness and rapid progress in AI
Where to find Aidan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidangomez
X: https://twitter.com/aidangomez
“Attention is all you need” paper by Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., ... & Polosukhin, I. (2017)
Where to find Azeem:
Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AzeemExponentially
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/azeem
🔮 The year of scaling enterprise AI, with Cohere's Aidan Gomez