Investors once saw Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build frontier AI models, with its backers pouring roughly $1 billion on their bet on CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern.
But Cohere’s AI models have fallen behind the state-of-the-art, and its business hasn’t scaled like its competitors.
Now, the company is bringing in a veteran research leader to revamp its AI efforts: Cohere has hired Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former VP of AI research who previously oversaw the tech giant’s fundamental AI research (FAIR) lab. In her newly created Chief AI Officer role, Pineau will oversee AI strategy across Cohere’s research, product and policy teams.
A Canadian AI scientist and McGill Professor, Pineau helped guide the early development of Meta’s open Llama AI models alongside Yann LeCun, a pioneer of neural networks. Pineau left Meta in May after nearly eight years with the company.
For Cohere this is a big hire, and it is pinning its hopes on the veteran helping it with more research breakthroughs, improving its research and product pipeline, and recruiting top talent.
The hire comes at a pivotal moment for Cohere: The company is reportedly seeking to raise up to $500 million at a $6.3 billion valuation — an impressive sum were the startup not competing with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic, whose war chests are worth dozens of billions each.
But while its rivals are trying to develop AI systems that can match (or exceed) human performance on a wide variety of tasks, Cohere has a narrower focus. The startup primarily builds AI applications that can solve practical problems for enterprises and government agencies, emphasizing privacy and security.
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In an interview with TechCrunch, Pineau said Cohere’s focus on real-world, enterprise applications is something she’s excited about. “A lot of players out there are quite singularly focused on AGI, superintelligence, and so on,” said Pineau, alluding to companies like her former employer, Meta, which recently invested billions in its new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) unit. “They haven’t necessarily figured out what this AI is going to be used for.”
She pointed to OpenAI’s launch of GPT-5 last week, which many felt was underwhelming, as evidence the timeline to achieving AGI may be “a little bit longer than we thought.” In the meantime, Pineau says there’s a lot of room for more practical AI models to deliver leaps in productivity in different industries.
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