Fundraising and Strategy in AI Development

Nick Frosst is a Canadian AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as co-founder of Cohere, the enterprise-focused LLM. Cohere has raised over $900 million, most recently a $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. Under his leadership, Cohere hit $100M in ARR. Prior to founding Cohere, Nick was a researcher at Google Brain and a protégé of Geoffrey Hinton.

AGENDA: 

00:00 – Biggest lessons from Geoff Hinton at Google Brain?

02:10 – Did Google completely sleep at the wheel and miss ChatGPT?

05:45 – Is data or compute the real bottleneck in AI’s future?

07:20 – Does GPT5 Prove That Scaling Laws are BS?

13:30 – Are AI benchmarks just total BS?

17:00 – Would Cohere spend $5M on a single AI researcher?

19:40 – What is nonsense in AI that everyone is talking about?

25:30 – What is no one talking about in AI that everyone should be talking about?

33:00 – How do Cohere compete with OpenAI and Anthropic’s billions?

44:30 – Why does being American actually hurt tech companies today?

45:10 – Should countries fund their own models? Is model sovereignty the future?

52:00 – Why has Sam Altman actually done a disservice to AI?