What really happened inside Google Brain when the “Attention is All You Need” paper was born? In this episode, Aidan Gomez — one of the eight co-authors of the Transformers paper and now CEO of Cohere — reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how a cold email and a lucky administrative mistake landed him at the center of the AI revolution.
Aidan shares how a group of researchers, given total academic freedom, accidentally stumbled into one of the most important breakthroughs in AI history — and why the architecture they created still powers everything from ChatGPT to Google Search today.
We dig into why synthetic data is now the secret sauce behind the world’s best AI models, and how Cohere is using it to build enterprise AI that’s more secure, private, and customizable than anything else on the market. Aidan explains why he’s not interested in “building God” or chasing AGI hype, and why he believes the real impact of AI will be in making work more productive, not replacing humans.
You’ll also get a candid look at the realities of building an AI company for the enterprise: from deploying models on-prem and air-gapped for banks and telecoms, to the surprising demand for multimodal and multilingual AI in Japan and Korea, to the practical challenges of helping customers identify and execute on hundreds of use cases.
Cohere
Website - https://cohere.com
X/Twitter - https://x.com/cohere
Aidan Gomez
LinkedIn - https://ca.linkedin.com/in/aidangomez
X/Twitter - https://x.com/aidangomez
FIRSTMARK
Website - https://firstmark.com
X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap
Matt Turck (Managing Director)
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/
X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck
(00:00) Intro
(02:00) The Story Behind the Transformers Paper
(03:09) How a Cold Email Landed Aidan at Google Brain
(10:39) The Initial Reception to the Transformers Breakthrough
(11:13) Google’s Response to the Transformer Architecture
(12:16) The Staying Power of Transformers in AI
(13:55) Emerging Alternatives to Transformer Architectures
(15:45) The Significance of Reasoning in Modern AI
(18:09) The Untapped Potential of Reasoning Models
(24:04) Aidan’s Path After the Transformers Paper and the Founding of Cohere
(25:16) Choosing Enterprise AI Over AGI Labs
(26:55) Aidan’s Perspective on AGI and Superintelligence
(28:37) The Trajectory Toward Human-Level AI
(30:58) Transitioning from Researcher to CEO
(33:27) Cohere’s Product and Platform Architecture
(37:16) The Role of Synthetic Data in AI
(39:32) Custom vs. General AI Models at Cohere
(42:23) The AYA Models and Cohere Labs Explained
(44:11) Enterprise Demand for Multimodal AI
(49:20) On-Prem vs. Cloud
(50:31) Cohere’s North Platform
(54:25) How Enterprises Identify and Implement AI Use Cases
(57:49) The Competitive Edge of Early AI Adoption
(01:00:08) Aidan’s Concerns About AI and Society
(01:01:30) Cohere’s Vision for Success in the Next 3–5 Years
