Aidan Gomez
Co-founder & CEO, Cohere. On 4 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientist@aidangomezzz ↗LinkedIn ↗aidangomez.ca ↗Wikipedia ↗
Aidan Gomez is the co-founder and CEO of Cohere, an AI company building enterprise-focused large language models. In 2017, he co-authored the landmark paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the Transformer architecture.
4shows
4appearances
118statements
16resolved
11supported
2contradicted
69%fully supported
15said about them ↓ Everything Aidan Gomez said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Gomez: Early AGI and EA ecosystem felt like LARPing a new religion
“The whole AGI effective altruist this whole ecosystem, it never resonated with me. It felt like cause playing. It felt like people were LARPing a new religion and all of this stuff like create God.”
Gomez: Anyone selling AI doom and gloom is wrong
“Anyone who's selling you doom and gloom, I think is wrong.”
Humanity Will Achieve Broadly Capable AGI but Will Not Build God
“We will build AGI if what you mean is very useful, generally capable technology that can do a lot of the stuff that humans can do and flex into a lot of different domains. If what you mean is, you know, are we gonna build God? No.”
Falling AI API Prices Stem From Price Dumping, Not Commoditization
“I don't think that models are actually getting commoditized. I think what you see is you see price dumping. And so you see people giving it out for free, giving it out at a loss, giving out at zero margin. And so they see the prices coming down and they assume…”
Gomez: AI will never cause mass unemployment of humans
“Well, because I think that we will never see mass unemployment of humans. I think that this technology is going to unlock more opportunities. It will let us do more as opposed to Scaling back what we do.”
Gomez: AI Models Are Less Capable and More Controllable Than Feared
“As more and more evidence emerges that these models are much more controllable than we may have thought that they're a little bit less capable than we may have thought it's harder and harder to make that narrative.”
Gomez: AI Self-Improvement Plateaus and Won't Cause Intelligence Explosion
“Not happening. It's not happening. It improves for, it can self-improve for a while, and then it tapers off. And so, yeah, you get some good improvement out of it, which is why we use it, but then it plateaus. It doesn't just keep going forever.”
Gomez: AI Can Reach AGI Through The Internet Without Physical Embodiment
“I actually take, I think the less popular view, which is The internet is enough, and by observation, you can actually learn enough to be extremely, extremely compelling. I think that's if we're talking about AGI and doing things as well as humans do, I think t…”
Aidan Gomez: Becoming dependent on cloud providers is dangerous for AI startups
“It's really dangerous when you make yourself a subsidiary of your cloud provider.”
Gomez: OpenAI's AGI effort is taking a backseat to consumer products
“At least like lately, or in the new OpenAI they're like a product company. They're like hardcore building a consumer product. That is their objective, and it's working. People love that product. It's, you know, a household name at this point. So I think in the…”
Aidan Gomez: AI agent developers are disadvantaged without owning model architecture
“If you're not able to actually transform the model to be better at the thing that you care about, if you're not the one building the model, if you're just a consumer of the model you're structurally disadvantaged to build that product.”
Aidan Gomez: AI Will Not Cause Mass Unemployment
“The fears around displacement and replacement, both on the consumer side, where we're all gonna get addicted to chatting to these chatbots, and on the workplace, the end of work, you know, there's gonna be mass unemployment. I can't see that happening.”
Gomez: In-person work provides an unquantifiable productivity lift over remote
“In-person is just so much better. It's just, you can't even quantify the productivity lift from in-person work.”
Gomez: Modern Transformers look strikingly similar to the original 2017 architecture
“And so one of the big shocks is how over the past eight years, how little things have changed. Like it, it's really surprising to me. That the Transformers we train today looks so similar to what was back then.”
Gomez: Google failed to lean into language modeling early, unlike OpenAI
“To say they didn't lean hard enough into language modeling, like just pure Sequence modeling of text on the internet. That's, I think the accurate statement. That's what OpenAI did early and uniquely well.”
Gomez: Discrete diffusion models will not replace the Transformer
“Now there are these discrete diffusion models, which do diffusion, which has been super popular for, like, image understanding, image generation. It's doing that same process for language models, but I still don't see that replacing the transformer.”
Gomez: Creating AI reasoning models is dramatically cheaper than pre-training
“It's easy to create a reasoning model. It's dramatically cheaper than pre-training. And so it's accessible. And so there's this huge intelligence uplift that comes for really quite little effort.”
Gomez: AI models will probably surpass the best doctors at prescribing drugs
“Is it better than the world's best doctor at prescribing drugs? Probably not. Will it get there? Probably.”
Gomez: Synthetic data makes up the majority of Cohere's training data
“Synthetic data is incredibly effective. It's now the majority of the data that we train on for creating something like command A.”
Gomez: AI agents cut financial research tasks from a month to hours
“So we can take something that used to be a month. And bring it down to, you know, four hours, eight hours.”
Cohere Will Not Build a Direct ChatGPT Competitor
“We're not going to build a ChatGPT competitor. What we want to build is a platform and a series of products to enable enterprises to adopt this technology and make it valuable.”
Current LLM Tech Alone Requires Five Years of Economic Integration Work
“Even if we didn't train a single new language model, like, okay, all the data centers blow up. We can't improve the LLM. We only have what we have today. There's a half decade of work to go integrate this into the economy, to build all these things, to build t…”
GPT-4 Class Enterprise Models Now Cost $10M to $20M to Train
“What we've seen is today you can build a model that's as good as GPT-IV in all the things that enterprises might care about. For ten million dollars, twenty million dollars, like just orders of magnitude less than what was spent to develop that model. And so i…”
Cohere Strategically Lags Frontier Labs by Six Months to Avoid $7B Burn
“So that's the strategy is don't lead. Don't burn, you know, three, five, seven billion dollars a year to be at the front, be six months behind. And offer something to market to enterprises that actually fits their needs at a price point that makes sense for th…”
The other half of the tape: Aidan Gomez's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 5 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 8Alex Kantrowitz 5Nick Frosst 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 10
Big Technology 5
2026 3 mentions in 1 episode
2025 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Aidan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cohere | 1 | 52 | 44% 4/9 | full record on 20VC → |
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cohere | 1 | 27 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Big Technology → |
 MADLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cohere | 1 | 21 | 100% 4/4 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Cohere | 1 | 18 | 100% 1/1 | full record on No Priors → |