Nick Frosst
Co-Founder, Cohere. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
2appearances
58statements
9resolved
7supported
0contradicted
78%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Nick Frosst said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Frosst: Meta's Llama is a corporate giveaway for notoriety, not open source
“Lama, Lama three, like the stuff Meta is doing great models, great engineers, really cool stuff. But it's not open source the way Linux is open source. It's not open source the way, you know, I don't know, like Wikipedia's contributions are open source in that…”
Frosst: Large language models are not a clear path to AGI
“I don't think
It's a clear path to AGI.
I don't think we're going to be making digital gods anytime soon.”
Frosst: Creating human-like AGI is not an obvious human need
“It's not obvious to me that we want AGI. I don't wake up in the morning and say, gee, I wish my computer was a person. I wake up in the morning and I say, gee, I wish I could do my work faster. Like, gee, I wish I didn't have to do this boring thing. Gee, I wi…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Frosst: AGI Hype Is the Most Damaging Rhetoric in AI
“I think the hype around AGI is the most damaging and confusing.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Frosst: Cohere is not chasing AGI, consumer bots, or public benchmarks
“So we're not interested in making like a public facing bot for consumers to talk to. We're not interested in chasing AGI. We're not interested in a lot of, there's a lot of like weird public benchmarks that exist trying to measure, you know, how close we are t…”
Frosst: AI enterprise value is in deployment and workflow, not weights
“When I think about Koshier's value, like it's not in, you know, the weights of any particular model. In fact, we we've released our model weights for researchers as well. So if researchers want to use our model, like they can download the weights from hugging …”
Frosst: AI agents will augment workers rather than replace full roles
“I think when you look at the work people do, there's actually a lot of edge cases they encounter all the time, and there's lots of things that they do that could not be done just on the world of the, just on text, just on the world of computers. They're actual…”
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 across the shows. 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
20VC 3
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- Cohere's Chief AI Officer, Joelle Pineau: Why Scaling Laws Will Continue & Future of Synthetic Data · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Nick'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, Cohere | 1 | 37 | 75% 6/8 | full record on 20VC → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder, Cohere | 1 | 21 | 100% 1/1 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |