Cohere For AI
A new AI Lab launches out of the startup Cohere
Hey Guys,
EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN TOGETHER,
I really like the news that Cohere is opening a new AI (non-profit) Lab. So today we’re going to explore his breaking news this week.
Cohere, a startup creating large language models to rival those from OpenAI, yesterday on June 14th, 2022 announced the launch of a nonprofit research lab: Cohere For AI.
The Google Brain has Descendent Startups and AI Labs
Headed by Google alum Sara Hooker, Cohere says that Cohere For AI will work to solve some of the industry's toughest challenges by contributing "fundamental research" to the open source community.
I really like that it’s a woman in AI leading it too.
She now leads Cohere For AI, a non-profit research lab that seeks to solve complex machine learning problems. They support fundamental research that explores the unknown, and are focused on creating more points of entry into machine learning research.
OpenAI has many startups and AI Labs that are working on the same things, and this competition of diversity of Labs and startups is good for the progress of A.I. While DeepMind and Microsoft Research in particular have world-class researchers and budgets to match, Google brain and Meta AI talent appears to be exiting to work on new exciting projects!
Cohere as you might know is part of Toronto’s significant AI community. Cohere is a Canadian startup that provides natural language processing models that help companies improve human-machine interactions. Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst.
Sara Hooker has the right personality and credentials here. Prior to Cohere For AI, Sara was a Research Scientist at Google Brain where she focused on training models that go beyond top-line metrics to effectively demonstrate ability to be interpretable, compact, fair, and robust. She also founded Delta Analytics, a non-profit that brings together researchers, data scientists, and software engineers to volunteer their skills for non-profits around the world.
She was at Google brain for 5 years. She’s been involved in Delta Analytics for even longer.
TechCrunch notes:
There’s long been a concern within the AI community that not enough funding is being set aside for AI research outside of wealthy corporations.
Some might argue OpenAI was supposed to be that platform before they made a deal with Microsoft for $1 Billion. Even Elon Musk basically said they had gone astray.
The Talent for A.I. is fierce and DeepMind researchers can summon huge sums of money. One study found that ties to corporations — either funding or affiliation — in AI research significantly grew from 2008 to 2019. Another study showed that Google parent company Alphabet, as well as Amazon and Microsoft, hired a whopping 52 tenure-track AI professors between 2004 and 2018, removing these would-be teachers from academic and nonprofit work.
There are literally people from Microsoft who follow my work not because they are genuinely interested in what I’m writing about. The entire point of writing on Substack is to be able to give an independent perspective. But I often share on LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft.
Creating New Points of Entry
The way Cohere AI describe the lab is also hopeful.
The machine learning field currently has too few points of entry, especially depending on where you are in the world. With Cohere For AI, Sara’s vision is to change how, where and by whom research is done. Cohere For AI represents the opportunity to make an impact in ways that don’t just advance progress on machine learning research, but also create new points of entry into the field.
I really think Sara will be an incredible ambassador for this movement to democratize machine learning better. Sara added on a LinkedIn post yesterday (June 14th) -
Cohere For AI is near and dear to my heart. My hope is to create the lab I wish had existed when I entered the field, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to lead this effort. Depending on where you’re located, there’s often a lack of opportunities in machine learning. Cohere For AI aims to reimagine how, where, and by whom research is done. I’m inspired by the opportunity to make an impact in ways that don’t just advance progress on machine learning research, but also broadens access to the field.
Give her a positive comment here.
While AI Labs always start well intentioned they have a habit as we saw with OpenAI to sell out and lean in on corporate partnerships which give them perks that are not just financial, with Microsoft they got supercomputer access.
As Transformers are showing the potential to scale in new ways, it’s pretty important there’s more legit non-profit AI Labs in the world. So who is funding them?
Road to nonprofit
Backed by AI luminaries including UC Berkeley AI lab co-director Pieter Abbeel, Cohere was founded in 2019 by a pedigreed team that includes Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst. Gomez co-authored the academic paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the world to a fundamental AI model architecture called the Transformer. (Among other high-profile systems, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Codex are based on the Transformer architecture.) Zhang, alongside Gomez, was a contributor at For.ai, an open AI research collective involving data scientists and engineers.
To join the community click on this link.
Pretty optimistic news all-around I think for the machine learning, data science and global research community. As I’ve mentioned how Quantum computing is establishing a hub in Toronto, the startup tech scene and AI scene there is already maturing rapidly in the early 2020s.
Still its worth noting that having a startup fund a non-profit AI Lab with affiliations to Google, is not necessarily a great sign. Cohere has raised $170 million to date from institutional venture capital firms, including Tiger Global Management and Index Ventures, and has a number of associations with Google. Google Cloud AI chief scientist Fei-Fei Li and Google fellow Geoffrey Hinton were early backers of Cohere. So in a sense this might be closer to Google Brain than we realize.
That being said, Fei-Fei Li is a very respectable character and one of the leading women in A.I. of our generation.
Thanks for reading!
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