The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Cohere Founder on How Cohere Compete with OpenAI and Anthropic $BNs | Why Counties Should Fund Their Own Models & the Need for Model Sovereignty | How Sam Altman Has Done a Disservice to AI with Nick Frosst
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Sep 1, 2025 
Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere and AI researcher, dives into the challenges and opportunities in AI development. He critiques the reliance on benchmarks and discusses how Cohere competes with giants like OpenAI. Frosst argues for countries funding their own AI models, emphasizing model sovereignty, and shares insightful reflections from his time at Google Brain with Geoffrey Hinton. He also addresses misconceptions about AI threats and the need for more relevant data over sheer computational power.
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Enterprise-First Model Strategy
- Cohere focuses its models specifically for enterprise tool use and secure data integrations.
- That specialization changes training data and product design compared with consumer models.
Train For The Workflow You Want
- Train models on the data that reflects the target workflow, not on engagement metrics.
- Use synthetic data to simulate company-specific APIs, emails, and tools to bootstrap enterprise performance.
Data And Fine-Tuning Matter Most
- Algorithms have changed little; data quality and training steps drive practical gains today.
- RLHF and supervised fine-tuning matter more than novel architectures for product utility.
