Aidan Gomez Unfiltered on AGI, China & AI's Biggest Risk

Summary · 3 min read

Aidan Gomez is a Cohere co-founder and co-author of the Transformer paper Attention Is All You Need. He says Cohere builds its own models and offers customers customization and deployment on their own infrastructure.

Aidan Gomez argues that dependence on a small number of AI providers creates a resilience risk for democracies, especially when critical infrastructure relies on services that can be switched off. He says current models qualify as AGI in many respects, while enterprise adoption remains early and model costs should fall as efficiency improves. He expects custom, sovereign deployments to matter more than competing only at the frontier, and says Chinese models are already highly capable even if the US remains ahead. He expects agents to move beyond software development but says their effect on employment remains uncertain.

Minute by minute

1. 0:00Too few providers create resilience risks

   Gomez warns that a small pool of large technology companies is becoming a single point of failure for democracies. He says computer engineers are taught to avoid that kind of system.

2. 0:32The Transformer remains the platform

   Gomez says the Transformer was built for a narrow translation task, and he is surprised it remains the foundation nearly 10 years later. He says it absorbed ideas from SSMs and expects innovation to continue above the architecture. Asked if we have AGI, he says yes in many respects because models can exceed human capabilities on many problems.

3. 3:18Enterprise AI has room to grow

   Gomez describes an adoption cycle: companies first encourage unrestricted use, then constrain budgets, while model makers improve efficiency. He expects costs to fall and lower costs to unlock more use; he estimates another 10 or 100x in enterprise token consumption beyond coding. In finance, he sees potential for automated decisions, communication, coordination, regulatory and compliance work.

4. 6:08Open source can cost more to run

   Gomez says open-source models may look cheaper by token price, but self-hosting adds infrastructure, software maintenance and the burden of updating the system as models change. He says customers also need to consider whether they are comfortable sending data to those providers, and compares operating an open-source model to self-hosting a database.

5. 8:03Tailored models can beat frontier scale

   Gomez says Cohere builds its own models because customers want lower costs, sovereignty and customization, and the market—not model capability—is often the bottleneck. He says he is not trying to compete at the frontier. He estimates models are good enough for 90 percent of what enterprises want to do, while the remaining 10 percent remains difficult and valuable.

6. 11:35Critical workloads need sovereign infrastructure

   Gomez says democratic countries have consolidated technology purchases among a small group of providers, which creates a single point of failure. For critical workloads, he argues countries should control the infrastructure they depend on. He says Cohere's planned Toronto-Berlin dual headquarters and its partnership with Aleph Alpha are part of building capability across democracies, not just two countries.

7. 15:15Access restrictions expose foreign dependence

   Discussing recent US restrictions on AI access, Gomez says the episode was the scenario Cohere had warned about. He argues that the US is pursuing its own interests, but other countries could lose access if they build critical infrastructure on services they do not control.

8. 16:57Gomez sees Chinese models as highly capable

   Gomez expects the US to continue leading in capability, but says Chinese models are extraordinarily capable and well-resourced by their government. He says distillation may have played a part, but Chinese companies are increasingly developing models independently and are on a strong trajectory.

9. 18:25Agents could reshape work and employment

   Gomez expects agents to move from software development into other enterprise fields, where developers already work with models as collaborators. He is unsure whether rising demand will offset displacement and says society should plan for that possibility, with options including retraining, UBI and jobs-guarantee programs.

Published Jun 26, 2026.