Inside the Paper That Changed AI Forever - Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on 2025 Agents
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What happened behind the scenes of the “Attention Is All You Need” paper?
The idea of increasing human productivity, letting humans do more, increasing supply, driving costs of things down, letting humans do more and accomplish more. That's what inspires me much more than building God or saving the world from AI. I want to save the world with AI.
Hi, I'm Matt Turk from Firstmark. Welcome back to the Matt Podcast. Today, my guest is Aiden Gomez, the CEO of Cohere. In 2017, Aiden was a third-year undergrad student who cold-emailed Google Brand, landed an internship, and ended up co-authoring Attention Is All You Need, the seminal transformers paper that helped usher the entire generative AI revolution. Fast forward to 2025 and Aiden. Aiden is now steering Cohere, a 500-person enterprise AI company that has raised over $1 billion in venture capital and powers Oracle, Notion, and many enterprise customers with a full-stack multilingual platform for AI agents. In this episode, we unpack the inside story of the Transformers paper, including the mishire that put Aiden in the room.
And I had to be like, oh no, like I need to finish third year undergrad. We don't hire undergrad students. I got in through an administrative mistake.
The state of AI research, including agents, reasoning compute, synthetic data, and why transformers is still the dominant architecture eight years after the paper was originally published.
So one of the big shocks is how over the past eight years, how little things have changed. It's really surprising to me that the transformers we train today look so similar to what was back then. We've just scratched the surface.
And why Kohir bed the farm on enterprise AI in the first place instead of focusing on the edge eye ego fest?
I never liked the the vibes of the whole AGI. It felt like cosplaying. It felt like people were LARPing a new religion. Frankly, Enterprise maybe has like a rap of being boring, but I think it's way more important.
This is a fantastic episode packed with fun stories and insights to understand the past, present, and future of AI. Please enjoy this great conversation with Aidan Gomez. Ayden, welcome.
Thank you, thank you, thanks for having me.
So to get started, I'd love for you to uh tell the story of the Transformers paper. You're famously one of the eight co-authors of it. And of course, Transformers and Attention is all you need is uh the seminal paper uh that led to everything that we're experiencing today in in in generative AI. What was your journey to it? How did you become part of the eight?
I was a student at the University of Toronto. Um And I'd been working on deep learning because A lot of the Early work in the field was obviously done by uh Jeff Hinton and and others at the school. Um So I've been getting quite close to it and I I was reading up on papers and I just kept seeing Google Brain. repeatedly across these papers, again and again and again, researchers from from Brain. And so eventually I I ended up reaching out to them, uh, reaching out to some of the researchers there and saying, Hey, listen, I read your paper. I have this idea uh of how to extend it. And one thing led to another and I got an offer to join.
You just cold email them? You found their email address and just like call email them. That's awesome.
Yeah. Well, on papers, you have like the email address under the author name. So I I could just reach out to them to say, hey, super cool experiments. Did you try this? What if we did this next? Uh and they replied to me and said, Hey, why don't you come down to uh Mountain View and and do some work with us? Uh so I Got hired as an intern on Lukash Kaiser's team, uh, and I was sat next to Noam Shazir. Um And that was sort of the start of it. Uh the end of it, if I skip all the way to the end, um I was leaving Google. Uh after the internship had had finished up, and they were throwing a little like goodbye, Aiden, you know, party, whatever, like some sweets and stuff. And my my manager Lukash is like, Okay, you know, everyone, Aiden's going back to his PhD.
Uh Aiden, how many more years have you got left?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What happened behind the scenes of the “Attention Is All You Need” paper?
0:00–6:25
2
How did a cold‑email and an administrative mistake land Aidan Gomez at Google Brain?
6:25–15:05
3
Why did the Transformers architecture become the dominant model for AI?
15:05–23:18
4
What are the emerging alternatives to the Transformer and why do they matter?
23:18–31:05
5
Why did Aidan choose to build an enterprise AI company instead of an AGI lab?
31:05–40:21
6
How does Cohere use synthetic data to train more secure and private models?
40:21–48:13
7
What is Cohere’s “North” platform and how does it enable AI agents in the enterprise?
48:13–57:33
8
What does the future look like for AI agents, multimodal models, and global productivity?
57:33–1:02:23
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
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