The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck Inside the Paper That Changed AI Forever - Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on 2025 Agents
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Jun 5, 2025 
Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere and co-author of the groundbreaking Transformers paper, reveals the serendipitous origins of this pivotal AI architecture. He discusses the role of synthetic data in creating cutting-edge enterprise solutions, emphasizing productivity over AGI hype. Aidan shares insights on building secure AI for industries like finance and telecommunications while adapting to multilingual needs in markets like Japan and Korea. His candid perspective on AI's real-world implications and the evolution of research environments is both enlightening and thought-provoking.
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Unexpected Internship Leads to Breakthrough
- Aidan Gomez landed his Google Brain internship through an administrative mistake, initially believed to be a PhD student but was an undergrad.
- This opportunity placed him at the center of the team that developed Transformers.
Transformers' Stronghold in AI
- Transformers remain dominant because the AI community has heavily invested in their ecosystem and infrastructure.
- New architectures must offer extraordinary benefits to replace the deeply entrenched Transformer models.
Surprised by Model Creativity
- Aidan was shocked by the creativity and human-like output of early language models like GPT-2.
- He shared an experience where a model authored a full Wikipedia-style article, surprising him by its quality.