Aidan Gomez (@aidangomez) is a computer scientist, co-author of the seminal paper ‘Attention Is All You Need,’ and the CEO of Cohere.

In this episode, we discussed his upbringing in the cabin his grandfather built in Codrington, a small town North of Brighton, and the values that were instilled in him through his family. We explored his path from Codrington to his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, emailing Geoffrey Hinton, and joining Google Brain where he co-wrote the paper on transformers.

We discussed how he met his co-founders Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, and his insights on what it means to build a meaningful, successful company in Canada. Aidan shares his conviction about what is at stake—for Canada and for the world at large.

This is a conversation about family, values, and what it means to live with conviction.

The Other Stuff is hosted by internetVin⁠, filmmaker and entrepreneur and possibly the most curious man on Earth. Produced by New.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 Intro
00:03:10 The Malleability of Toronto
00:11:06 Growing Up in Codrington
00:13:50 The Story of Aidan Gomez’s Family
00:27:23 Introduction to the Internet
00:30:39 Values and Work Ethic
00:35:46 University of Toronto’s AI Scene
00:40:48 Emailing Geoffrey Hinton
00:42:16 Google Brain
00:45:15 Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting
00:49:48 The Beauty of Research
00:54:24 One Model to Rule Them All
00:59:54 Meeting Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst
01:04:00 The Birth of Cohere
01:06:56 Twitter Influencers and Alex Friedland
01:11:48 Being the CEO
01:12:51 Building for Canada
01:15:01 Three Fundamental Ingredients of Building a Company
01:21:39 Working with the Canadian Government
01:24:39 Reflexivity in Canada
01:36:22 What Is Evil?
01:42:40 The Role of AI in the World

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The Other Stuff Podcast: https://otherstuffpod.com

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