Cohere's Ivan Zhang on Foundation Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Feedback Loops

In this episode, Madrona Partner Jon Turow and Cohere CTO and Co-founder Ivan Zhang dive into the world of foundation models for the enterprise. Cohere was founded in 2019 — a time when even the most passionate believers did not realize how soon the world would be struck by the capabilities of foundation models. The company announced a $270 million raise in June – which put it at an over $2 billion valuation — and — Ivan’s co-founder Aidan Gomez was a co-author of the seminal paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which actually introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind foundation models. Notwithstanding the big numbers, Cohere keeps itself scrappy and hungry, having still only raised a fraction of what others in the space have to date.

In this episode, Ivan shares about his decision not to finish school and instead gain practical experience working in startups and publishing research to basically prove that he could without a degree. He dishes about applying that same renegade spirit to hiring, shares his thoughts about the importance of feedback loops with customers as well as the difference between fine-tuning and teaching a model how to retrieve the right knowledge, and so much more.

You can read a transcript of this conversation here: https://www.madrona.com/cohere-ivan-zhang/