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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 behind CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern.<\/p>\n
But Cohere\u2019s AI models have fallen behind the state-of-the-art, and its business hasn\u2019t scaled like its competitors.<\/p>\n
Now, the company is bringing in a veteran research leader to revamp its AI efforts: Cohere has hired Joelle Pineau, Meta\u2019s former VP of AI research who previously oversaw the tech giant\u2019s fundamental AI research (FAIR) lab. In her newly created chief AI officer role, Pineau will oversee AI strategy across Cohere\u2019s research, product, and policy teams.<\/p>\n
A Canadian AI scientist and McGill professor, Pineau helped guide the early development of Meta\u2019s open Llama AI models alongside Yann LeCun, a pioneer of neural networks. Pineau left Meta<\/a> in May after nearly eight years with the company.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n The hire comes at a pivotal moment for Cohere: The company just raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> In an interview with TechCrunch, Pineau said Cohere\u2019s focus on real-world enterprise applications is something she\u2019s excited about. \u201cA lot of players out there are quite singularly focused on AGI, superintelligence, and so on,\u201d said Pineau, alluding to companies like her former employer, Meta, which recently invested billions in its new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) unit. \u201cThey haven\u2019t necessarily figured out what this AI is going to be used for.\u201d<\/p>\n She pointed to OpenAI\u2019s launch of GPT-5<\/a> last week, which many felt was underwhelming, as evidence the timeline to achieving AGI may be \u201ca little bit longer than we thought.\u201d In the meantime, Pineau says there\u2019s a lot of room for more practical AI models to deliver leaps in productivity in different industries.<\/p>\n A Canada native, Pineau said she\u2019s had her eye on Cohere since they were founded in 2019, and that she\u2019s excited to contribute to a company whose founders are based in her home country.<\/p>\n Beyond the patriotism, Pineau feels the opportunity with Cohere is a good chance to venture beyond research. At FAIR, Pineau oversaw research teams working on projects that could take anywhere from 18 months to 10 years to deliver. Now, she\u2019ll be working within a much tighter timeline, as well as getting involved with customers and products. And even though Cohere has fewer resources than Meta, Pineau said she\u2019ll be more agile in her new role.<\/p>\n Cohere\u2019s latest product is an AI agent platform dubbed North<\/a> that enterprises and government agencies can deploy privately on their own infrastructure, an attractive notion for many of its customers, which are banks and federal organizations that handle highly sensitive data. That puts Cohere in competition with open source providers like DeepSeek and Meta, whose models can also be run locally, but at a lower cost. Cohere is betting that by offering more support around its private deployments, it can beat out open models.<\/p>\n Pineau said she\u2019s particularly interested in gearing more of Cohere\u2019s research around North, figuring out ways to develop AI agents in private and secure settings, and creating benchmarks to evaluate these systems. Pineau also said she\u2019s interested in exploring how networks of AI agents interact with each other in the real world.<\/p>\n One immediate challenge for Pineau will be replacing Cohere\u2019s VP of AI Research, Sara Hooker, who announced her departure<\/a> this week after several years of helping build the company\u2019s research program. Hiring an AI researcher of Hooker\u2019s caliber may be difficult in the current market given the skyrocketing demand for AI talent.<\/p>\n But Pineau sees this as an opportunity to \u201cbring in a lot of talent,\u201d noting that when she left Meta, several of her former colleagues suggested they\u2019d follow her to a new AI lab. However, she emphasized that Cohere has a solid base of AI researchers, and that it\u2019s important to not just bring in anyone.<\/p>\n \u201cHiring a bunch of superstars doesn\u2019t necessarily make a superstar team,\u201d said Pineau. \u201cIt\u2019s really about how the people work together.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, Meta\u2019s AI units today look very different compared with when Pineau was there just a few months ago. Over the summer, Mark Zuckerberg went on a recruiting spree<\/a>, reportedly offering some of the industry\u2019s best AI researchers compensation packages north of $100 million to join MSL. That prompted OpenAI to also raise compensation for its star employees, thus making it quite difficult for smaller players to land top AI researchers.<\/p>\n As Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic throw billions of dollars at their AI efforts, Cohere is trying to do more with less. For Pineau, that will mean making calculated research bets \u2014 the kind that can quickly turn into compelling products and keep the company in the race.<\/p>\n We\u2019re always looking to evolve, and by providing some insight into your perspective and feedback into TechCrunch and our coverage and events, you can help us! Fill out\u00a0<\/em>this survey<\/a><\/em>\u00a0to let us know how we\u2019re doing and get the chance to win a prize in return!<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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