OpenAI competitor: Reason why Nvidia, Oracle are investing in AI startup Cohere

Gadgets Now Bureau / Updated: Jun 9, 2023, 07:38AM IST

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OpenAI competitor: Reason why Nvidia, Oracle are investing in AI startup Cohere

Cohere, an AI foundation model startup, has raised $270 million in a funding round from investors, which include technology giants such as Nvidia, Oracle and Salesforce Ventures. The Toronto-based AI startup competes with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and focuses on building AI models for enterprise customers.

Led by former AI researchers at Google
Cohere is led by former top AI researchers at Google Brain, a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, where they worked on large language models.

Startup co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez along with Nick Frosst, worked at Google to develop transformers, a new natural language processing method that improves contextual awareness and accuracy.

Not tied to cloud providers like Google, Microsoft
The startup positions itself to be a neutral provider for enterprises to use models that are not tied to cloud providers like Microsoft or Alphabet's Google, according to news agency Reuters.

This means that the company will provide generative AI service without having to worry about proprietary data being fed into large language models. OpenAI, the company which built ChatGPT, requires large amounts of data to train its model. It is also said to be working with enterprise clients to address these concerns.

"We're independent. We did not and we would not take a huge check from a single company, especially not a huge check from a single cloud provider, because we think that would constrain us from doing the right things for our business and our enterprise customers," Martin Kon, president at Cohere, was quoted as saying.

Kon added that Cohere will use the capital for purchasing computing resources and hiring.

Cohere makes AI tools that can power copywriting, search and summarisation. It says that its current customers include global streaming platforms, apparel companies and companies that use the platform to streamline customer service.

Not first startup to get big funding
Last month, another AI startup Anthropic received backing from Google. Salesforce Venture also invested in Anthropic.

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