Welcome to this week’s edition of Eye on A.I. I’m just back from San Francisco where, as Alexei reported last week, we hosted Fortune’s Brainstorm A.I. conference. It was wonderful to see some of you there. Alexei did a great job of providing a summary of some of the key takeaways in last week’s newsletter. I highly recommend reading his report, if you haven’t already.
One overwhelming trend that was clear from the conference was the way in which advances in natural language processing are rapidly transforming business. The technology is enabling unstructured data to be pulled directly from written documents and analyzed and summarized. It’s also powering the advent of more useful chatbots and the creation and editing of images from text prompts for both entertainment and marketing. These NLP-based technologies are going to shake up the way a lot of established companies do stuff. It is also going to create some amazing opportunities for startups to build potentially big businesses on the back of these capabilities, fine-tuned on smaller data sets for various industry verticals.
If we needed another proof point, this week brings news that one of the new breed of A.I. startups has scored a major coup by hiring away a top executive from one of the FANGs to lead its operations. Cohere AI, which itself was created by alumni of Alphabet’s Google Brain research division, has hired Martin Kon, currently the chief financial officer at YouTube, to be its new president and chief operating officer. (Kon’s official title at YouTube is business finance officer, and his role is more expansive than might be the case for a traditional CFO, even at a company with $28 billion in annual revenues, as Alphabet’s YouTube had in 2021. Kon has responsibility for YouTube’s strategy, finance, business operations, and commercial data analytics and reports directly to both YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat.)
In an exclusive interview with Eye on A.I., Kon tells me he sees natural language processing as “the next disruption and transformation in how we, as humans, inform and entertain ourselves.” He points out that 90% of enterprise data is unstructured, and that NLP is the key to unlocking it. The problem, he says, is that building a large language model of your own requires very expensive supercomputing infrastructure. And while Google has that kind of infrastructure, much of it is focused on using A.I. to generate improvements in Google’s existing product suite, not in rolling out products aimed at enterprise customers to help them transform their own businesses, Kon says. Cohere, on the other hand, is all about bringing "Google-quality A.I. to the masses,” he says. The company has a close partnership with Google that has enabled it to build its NLP capabilities using Google’s data centers, including computer chips, called tensor processing units (or TPUs) that Google built specifically for A.I.
Aidan Gomez, Cohere’s co-founder and CEO, says Kon is the right person to help Cohere bring these products to market. “The major project for Cohere right now is turning in a go-to-market direction,” Gomez says. And he says Kon has experience from YouTube in how to bring new products to market and create a successful community (creators in the case of YouTube, developers in the case of Cohere) around those products.
This week Cohere debuted a large language model that can understand text in more than 100 languages—which is more powerful than other NLP models that tend to be trained only in a single language, usually English. According to Gomez, the company is now working on rolling out products in three areas: one that can create coherent blog posts and other kinds of writing, one that can summarize large amounts of text, and one that can do search and information retrieval. (For more on what this new NLP revolution in search might mean, see the Brain Food section of today's newsletter.)
And with that, here’s the rest of this week’s A.I. news.
Jeremy Kahn
@jeremyakahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
