- Microsoft Corp MSFT-backed OpenAI rival Cohere weighed raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a funding round that could value the startup at over $6 billion.
- Cohere, established by former researchers at Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL in 2019, quickly scaled the AI startup ranks given their intensive research background and close ties to Google, Reuters reports.
- Cohere eyed introducing a new dialogue model resembling ChatGPT to let enterprise users generate text and engage with the model to refine the output.
- Unlike ChatGPT, Cohere's technology will mainly be accessible to developers and businesses, CEO Aidan Gomez told Reuters in an interview.
- "Our chat models are focused more on business-applicable tasks like answering questions than writing poems. We don't plan to hand them over to everyone to use for free without limit," said Gomez.
- Cohere has raised $170 million to date from funds.
- Cohere competes with a group of foundation model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Gomez said the company differentiates itself by focusing on serving enterprise users.
- Cohere forged a cloud partnership with Alphabet to access its TPU computing power in 2022.
- Its language AI also became available on Amazon.Com Inc's AMZN fully managed machine learning service SageMaker in January.
- In January, Cohere hired Martin Kon, the former chief finance executive at YouTube, to lead its product and market strategy.
- Gomez said Cohere would focus on text generation models, unlike its peer OpenAI which has released GPT-3 model for text and DALL-E for image generation.
- Gomez said Cohere would not take strategic investments that require exclusive rights.
- "It's important for us to stay independent and work with different cloud providers," said Gomez.
- Photo via Wikimedia Commons
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