According to Sara Hooker, languages are what truly connect us as humans. The former Google Brain researcher since 2022 has led Cohere for AI, the nonprofit research lab of Cohere, the Toronto-based AI model company valued at $5.5 billion. And Hooker speaks from experience. Her Irish mother and British father met in Sudan, and Hooker grew up moving to Mozambique, Eswatini, Kenya, and Liberia. That meant she heard and had to learn many different languages—she even attended middle school in Mozambique where lessons were only in Portuguese.
“Language is super personal for me to work on,” she tells Fortune. “There’s this really powerful idea that when you speak in the language of someone, you really connect with their heart, not their head.”
