Aidan Gomez: the quiet architect behind ChatGPT
Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez co-developed the transformer technology that underpins ChatGPT and the entire generation of large language models.
Without people like Aidan Gomez, the entire new AI wave would not have been possible. The Cohere co-founder contributed as a researcher to the scientific foundations on which ChatGPT and other language models are built. Today he runs his own company – and is betting, of all things, on trust and data protection.
What is at stake
“We created a global standard,” Aidan Gomez tells me in San Francisco. In 2017 he co-authored the research paper “Attention Is All You Need” – the text that introduced the transformer architecture and made the current AI boom possible. Today Gomez leads Cohere, an AI start-up that is deliberately positioned differently from OpenAI or Anthropic: with a focus on enterprise customers and European data protection standards.
Why Cohere takes Europe seriously
Unlike most AI rivals, Cohere has deep German roots. The head of machine learning is Nils Reimers, a computer scientist from Frankfurt. In the last funding round, besides Nvidia, Oracle and Salesforce, the DAX group SAP invested in the company – 270 million dollars in total. Cohere is valued at around two billion dollars. Private investors also include AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li. The strategy: companies that do not want to upload sensitive data to the United States get models from Cohere that can run on their own servers.
How Gomez intends to challenge OpenAI
OpenAI, with Microsoft as its partner, is the dominant provider of AI language models. Gomez does not aim to break that dominance head-on – he wants to flank it. “Trust and data protection are at the centre of what we do,” he says. The key difference: “Companies can even run our models on their own servers if they want to.” OpenAI, by contrast, is tightly tied to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Cohere also differentiates by building specialised models for specific industries – legal, medical and financial applications, for example.
What this means for the industry
The AI market will diversify over the coming years. OpenAI dominates the consumer segment around ChatGPT. Anthropic is positioning Claude as the serious safety-focused alternative. Cohere is occupying the enterprise space. For German companies, this is significant: those unwilling to store critical data in US clouds need alternatives – and Cohere is offering exactly that. Trust is becoming a strategic resource. Gomez believes that it will not be the most powerful models but the most trustworthy ones that win in the long run.
I wrote the full profile for Handelsblatt.