#80 AIDAN GOMEZ [CEO Cohere] - Language as Software

We had a conversation with Aidan Gomez, the CEO of language-based AI platform Cohere. Cohere is a startup which uses artificial intelligence to help users build the next generation of language-based applications. It's headquartered in Toronto. The company has raised $175 million in funding so far. Language may well become a key new substrate for software building, both in its representation and how we build the software. It may democratise software building so that more people can build software, and we can build new types of software. Aidan and I discuss this in detail in this episode of MLST. Check out Cohere -- dashboard.cohere.ai/welcome/register?utm_source=in… Support us! www.patreon.com/mlst Pod version: anchor.fm/machinelearningstreettalk/episodes/80-AI… TOC: [00:00:00] Aidan Gomez intro [00:02:12] What's it like being a CEO? [00:02:52] Transformers [00:09:33] Deepmind Chomsky Hierarchy [00:14:58] Cohere roadmap [00:18:18] Friction using LLMs for startups [00:25:31] How different from OpenAI / GPT-3 [00:29:31] Engineering questions on Cohere [00:35:13] Francois Chollet says that LLMs are like databases [00:38:34] Next frontier of language models [00:42:04] Different modes of understanding in LLMs [00:47:04] LLMs are the new extended mind [00:50:03] Is language the next interface, and why might that be bad? References: [Balestriero] Spine theory of NNs proceedings.mlr.press/v80/balestriero18b/balestrie… [Delétang et al] Neural Networks and the Chomsky Hierarchy arxiv.org/abs/2207.02098 [Fodor, Pylyshyn] Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/d… [Chalmers, Clark] The extended mind icds.uoregon.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Clark-… [Melanie Mitchell et al] The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2210.13966 [Jay Alammar] Illustrated stable diffusion jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/ Illustrated transformer jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/    / @arp_ai   [Sandra Kublik] (works at Cohere!)    / @itssandrakublik