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Nick Frosst

Co-Founder, Cohere · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderscientistentertainer@nickfrosst ↗LinkedIn ↗nickfrosst.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

Nick Frosst co-founded Cohere, an enterprise-focused large language model company, after working as one of Geoffrey Hinton’s first machine learning researchers at Google Brain in Toronto. Outside of technology, he is the lead singer and frontman of the indie pop-rock band Good Kid.

37statements → 17claims → 8claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.86/5average certainty → 2.78/5average debate potential → 4.0/5argument clarity · the sources → 3said about them ↓

6 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not yet assessed 7 not checkable as stated how the 17 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

6 predictions · 11 assertions · 10 opinions · 7 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 17 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 8 are resolved, 2 are not yet assessed, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Nick argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Frosst: All creators of the Transformer architecture eventually left Google
“It is interesting that all the people who worked on the transformer left To continue to work on the transformer.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 3:12 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
50% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
83% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.0 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.3 · precision 3.7 · compression 3.4

redirected or did not address 2 of 37 assessed questions (5%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

299 words/min while actually speaking · 20.9 um and uh per 1k words · 18.5 false starts per 1k · 27.6% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 11,410 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 4/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 4/10
setup questions received 35%

Everything Nick Frosst said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Frosst: Sam Altman warning leaders about AI threat was disingenuous
“He did a world tour where he spoke to every major leader the world over to tell them, hey, this technology is gonna pose an existential threat. And I think that was academically disingenuous, and I think did a disservice to the technology he loves.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 0:13 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: Sam Altman's AGI timeline hype does a disservice to the world
“I don't think Sam Altman has done a service to the world by talking about how close AGI is.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 1:05:18 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: Sam Altman's AI predictions were obviously wrong when made
“I think he has made several predictions now that are wrong, and that were obviously wrong at the time he made them.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 0:05 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Frosst: Current large language model technology will not lead to AGI
“I think when people are talking about building towards AGI like, I don't think this technology gets us there.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 10:04 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Frosst: Benchmark scores measure training dataset overlap rather than true model utility
“They're a reflection of how much the model had been trained on those benchmarks.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 17:29 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: Claims of AI Posing an Imminent Existential Threat Are Incorrect
“The idea that, oh, this technology is like poses an imminent existential threat to humanity writ large was not a, was incorrect.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 24:02 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Frosst: LLM architecture makes independent scientific breakthroughs fundamentally impossible
“No, no, that's not a matter of time. That's fundamentally the way that sequence models work. Like we are training statistical models of text.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 27:01 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: Existential AGI risk rhetoric distracts from real issues like inequality
“I think those existential threat questions made it harder to talk about the real things, you know, like income inequality.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 30:42 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Frosst: Google failed to quickly commercialize or scale the Transformer
“It wasn't then commercialized very quickly within Google. It wasn't scaled up very quickly within Google. A lot of that work had to be done elsewhere and years later.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 2:41 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Frosst: All creators of the Transformer architecture eventually left Google
“It is interesting that all the people who worked on the transformer left To continue to work on the transformer.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 3:12 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Frosst: Data quality, not algorithms, is the primary bottleneck for AI progress
“But the algorithms I think are not the bottleneck in terms of making those models more useful. I do think a lot of it is still getting good quality data and then making good quality synthetic data From your good quality real data.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 7:02 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Frosst: Enterprise customers rarely request math reasoning capabilities from LLMs
“None of our customers ask the model to do math reasoning. That doesn't come up in the workplace that often that comes up in a few workplaces where mathematicians work, but there aren't a ton of people out there making a living doing math reasoning.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 16:37 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Frosst: Enterprise clients will never demand Arc AGI pixel manipulation features
“Stuff like the Arc AGI challenge is a benchmark that people talk about, but that's like a pixel manipulation challenge. It's like, you know, taking in like a grid of pixels and based on rules, predicting the next one. That's not a thing any of our customers ha…”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 16:56 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: AGI Hype Is the Most Damaging Rhetoric in AI
“I think the hype around AGI is the most damaging and confusing.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 23:52 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Frosst: Large language models have made zero independent scientific or intellectual breakthroughs
“There has been no independent breakthrough that an LLM has made. Right. There has been no, like nobody has seen, nobody asked in LLM, Hey, solve this problem. No one's solved before and get the answer. The breakthroughs are still people.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 26:39 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Frosst: Cohere spent orders of magnitude less on models than competitors
“We have spent Orders of magnitude less on creating foundational models than some of the other foundational model companies out there. Truly orders of magnitude less.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 41:00 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Supported
Frosst: China has not yet built AI models that beat top US models
“They haven't yet. Right. They've made good models. Definitely good models, but I don't think they've made models that are like beating, you know, the other models out there.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 1:09:19 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Frosst: Creating the Best AI Model Requires Training Directly on Its Interface
“And if you want to make the best model for a given, you know, interface, it's best to be training the model on that interface.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 12:19 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: Enterprise workers do not need or want image generation models
“Nobody in the workforce is really wanting to generate images as part of their work for the most part. It doesn't, but as a consumer, it's very fun. It's very cool to be like, oh, here, give me a picture of this or something. So we, the types of models we train…”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 44:31 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Frosst: Cohere has received M&A acquisition offers
“Oh, yeah, we have at times. Yeah.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 47:45 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: US and Chinese AI models cannot replace sovereign, culturally native models
“And I think just using a model that is built, you know, by China or built within America might not set your country and your economy up as well as having a model that understands the context built in that language, in that dialect, in like, you know, has the c…”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 57:58 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Frosst: AI language models are critical national infrastructure like power plants
“I think it's a good idea for countries to have infrastructure within their countries. Like, I think it's a good idea for people to have power plants in the country. You know, I like that Canada has several nuclear power plants and has several water power plant…”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 1:00:06 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Frosst: VR headsets will fail mass adoption due to real-world isolation
“And I think, you know, I was really excited about VR for a while. And then I realized I actually don't want to strap a computer to my face. I'm not interested in being disengaged from the world more. I want to be engaged in the world more than I am. I don't wa…”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 1:01:34 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Frosst: AI benchmark fixation is unhelpful for regulation because benchmarks are easily gamed
“Fixation on particular benchmarks, which can be gamed and can be trained either to do way better on or way worse on. Are not helpful for establishing how the technology can be used and misused.”
Nick Frosst Sep 1, 2025 ▶ 1:08:39 Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Show 13statements(13 left)

The other half of the tape: Nick Frosst's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2Aidan Gomez 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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01220242025episodes it came up in
000.511220242025episodesmentions per episode
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI D Sep 1, 2025 49m
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