Gomez: Early AGI and EA ecosystem felt like LARPing a new religion
Aidan Gomez · Inside the Paper That Changed AI Forever - Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on 2025 Agents · Jun 5, 2025 · at 25:39
Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere and co-author of the Transformers paper, explains why Cohere chose an enterprise AI strategy instead of forming a consumer-facing AGI lab.
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“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.”
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“Anyone who's selling you doom and gloom, I think is wrong.”
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“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.”
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“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.”