Upstarts · 2 min · Apr 16, 2026

Cohere began with a bet on training a model on the whole web

Aidan Gomez · Co-founder & CEO, Cohere

Aidan Gomez and co-founder Ivan traded ideas before choosing to train a model on the internet, after seeing early language-model results.

In this episode

30:18 Cohere chose independence over the easier growth path5 min
21:48 Gomez sees AI-driven growth as a defense against scarcity4 min
25:13 AI sovereignty depends on a diverse supply of providers4 min
36:31 Cohere keeps humans involved in sensitive AI decisions3 min
4:13 North lets staff build automations without creating a new product3 min
18:49Cohere began with a bet on training a model on the whole web2 min
8:17 Rural internet scarcity led Gomez into hands-on AI research5 min
39:33 Gomez wants Cohere to IPO for broader ownership and scrutiny2 min

“what if we treat the entire internet, like all the pictures, the videos, etc. As a data set to train on”

Aidan Gomezat 20:09 · Upstarts

Takeaways

Co-founder Ivan pushed to start a company while Gomez was doing a PhD.
Early Wikipedia and GPT-2 results helped shape their web-scale training idea.
They had not worked out the business model at first.

About this segment

Aidan Gomez and co-founder Ivan traded ideas before choosing to train a model on the internet, after seeing early language-model results. The technical bet came before a clear monetization plan.

Aidan Gomez is co-founder and CEO of Cohere.

Co-founded Cohere, the sovereign AI company, and co-authored the Transformer paper, Attention Is All You Need.

Alex Konrad, Host · Founder & editor, Upstarts Media
Ran Forbes' Midas List for ten years and co-created its Cloud 100 list; founded Upstarts in 2025.

From “Cohere's Aidan Gomez: The Canadian Founder Taking AI Models To The World, Not Just Big Tech”, Apr 16, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

18:56
On your entrepreneurial journey. So it sounds like at Oxford, you're like, okay, we've got to build something here. Would you have kind of always had in the back of your mind, maybe I'm going to do a company or did it need to be the right moment, the right idea to feel excited to really go into company building? so Ivan my co-founder he had been messaging me being like man like I you know I'm kind of done working where I'm working he's working at some other startup um I want to do a startup and I was in the middle of my PhD so I was like good luck you know but I was like dude I really don't want you like wasting like a company is such a huge commitment I don't want you wasting you know years of your time on some stupid idea let's come up with a cool idea together and so we were sending each other ideas back and forth um we had a bunch of ideas and then eventually there
19:49
was this one which i think precipitated cohere and it was uh train a model of the web and we didn't know how that was going to be a business but we had seen these like internally google There were results on modeling Wikipedia with language models, produced incredibly compelling text. GPT-2 came out. We saw the result of training on a much broader source of text. And so we just said, okay, what if we treat the entire internet, like all the pictures, the videos, etc.
20:20
As a data set to train on, I bet you something interesting is going to fall out of that, and that eventually is sort of what led to Cohere. We started to see these results like GPT-2, and it just gave us the conviction that there was some direction of travel here which was going to be pretty important. We went from a world where you couldn't speak to computers in natural language, and certainly they couldn't speak back to you in natural language, to one where that seemed like a plausible future.