Cohere Co-founder Rethinks Artificial General Intelligence, Focuses on Enterprise
Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst is dodging the hullabaloo surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI). Instead, he’s focusing on the enterprise market for its generative AI technology.
Despite being one of the more high-profile names in the world of generative AI, Cohere is relatively unknown to consumers, who have flocked to chatbots and other tools from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity. For Frosst, the company is all about business.
“I’m in meetings with companies in health care, banking, and IT all the time,” Frosst told CNBC. “The questions I get are about securely automating tasks like HR, payrolls, research, and fraud detection to drive productivity. No one has ever asked me about achieving AGI, let alone ASI (artificial superintelligence).”
In its latest funding round in July, Cohere raised $500 million at a $5.5 billion valuation, more than doubling its valuation from the prior year. Investors in the company include Nvidia, AMD, Salesforce, and Oracle.
Unlike some of its competitors, Cohere is focused exclusively on the enterprise market, creating products for large language models that can be used to automate tasks such as HR, payroll, research, and fraud detection. According to Frosst, this approach is centered around the idea that large language models are best at automating “tedious tasks and being a co-worker.”
OpenAI and Anthropic, on the other hand, are focused on achieving AGI and superintelligence, respectively. Frosst believes that large language models are better suited for automating tasks in the workplace, allowing people to focus on more creative and high-value tasks.
To that end, Cohere has been working on its AI agent platform, North, which allows users to customize and deploy AI agents with ease. The platform is focused on automating tasks such as summarizing questions and answers in HR, speeding up financial reporting, and automating business functions in customer support and IT.
Despite the demands on its resources, Cohere believes it can run efficiently and keep expenses under control, thanks to its focus on the enterprise market. This, in turn, allows it to be “more capital-efficient,” a quality that is increasingly attractive to investors.
Competition is fierce, and the technology is evolving rapidly, with Anthropic and OpenAI making significant strides in the field. However, Frosst is confident that Cohere can differentiate itself by focusing on the enterprise market and providing a more capital-efficient approach to AI.