Cohere hires long-time Meta research head Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer

Buyers as soon as noticed Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to problem OpenAI and Anthropic within the race to construct frontier AI fashions, with its backers pouring roughly $1 billion behind CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern.

However Cohere’s AI fashions have fallen behind the state-of-the-art, and its enterprise hasn’t scaled like its opponents.

Now, the corporate is bringing in a veteran analysis chief to revamp its AI efforts: Cohere has employed Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former VP of AI analysis who beforehand oversaw the tech big’s basic AI analysis (FAIR) lab. In her newly created chief AI officer position, Pineau will oversee AI technique throughout Cohere’s analysis, product, and coverage groups.

A Canadian AI scientist and McGill professor, Pineau helped information the early improvement of Meta’s open Llama AI fashions alongside Yann LeCun, a pioneer of neural networks. Pineau left Meta in Might after practically eight years with the corporate.

For Cohere it is a large rent, and it’s pinning its hopes on the veteran serving to it with extra analysis breakthroughs, bettering its analysis and product pipeline, and recruiting prime expertise.

The rent comes at a pivotal second for Cohere: The corporate simply raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation — a formidable sum have been the startup not competing with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic, whose conflict chests are price dozens of billions every.

However whereas its rivals try to develop AI programs that may match (or exceed) human efficiency on all kinds of duties, Cohere has a narrower focus. The startup primarily builds AI purposes that may clear up sensible issues for enterprises and authorities businesses, emphasizing privateness and safety.

In an interview with iinfoai, Pineau mentioned Cohere’s give attention to real-world enterprise purposes is one thing she’s enthusiastic about. “A number of gamers on the market are fairly singularly centered on AGI, superintelligence, and so forth,” mentioned Pineau, alluding to corporations like her former employer, Meta, which not too long ago invested billions in its new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) unit. “They haven’t essentially discovered what this AI goes for use for.”

She pointed to OpenAI’s launch of GPT-5 final week, which many felt was underwhelming, as proof the timeline to reaching AGI could also be “somewhat bit longer than we thought.” Within the meantime, Pineau says there’s a number of room for extra sensible AI fashions to ship leaps in productiveness in numerous industries.

A Canada native, Pineau mentioned she’s had her eye on Cohere since they have been based in 2019, and that she’s excited to contribute to an organization whose founders are primarily based in her house nation.

Past the patriotism, Pineau feels the chance with Cohere is an effective likelihood to enterprise past analysis. At FAIR, Pineau oversaw analysis groups engaged on initiatives that might take wherever from 18 months to 10 years to ship. Now, she’ll be working inside a a lot tighter timeline, in addition to getting concerned with prospects and merchandise. And although Cohere has fewer assets than Meta, Pineau mentioned she’ll be extra agile in her new position.

Cohere’s newest product is an AI agent platform dubbed North that enterprises and authorities businesses can deploy privately on their very own infrastructure, a horny notion for a lot of of its prospects, that are banks and federal organizations that deal with extremely delicate information. That places Cohere in competitors with open supply suppliers like DeepSeek and Meta, whose fashions can be run domestically, however at a decrease value. Cohere is betting that by providing extra help round its personal deployments, it might beat out open fashions.

Pineau mentioned she’s notably fascinated about gearing extra of Cohere’s analysis round North, determining methods to develop AI brokers in personal and safe settings, and creating benchmarks to guage these programs. Pineau additionally mentioned she’s fascinated about exploring how networks of AI brokers work together with one another in the true world.

One rapid problem for Pineau might be changing Cohere’s VP of AI Analysis, Sara Hooker, who introduced her departure this week after a number of years of serving to construct the corporate’s analysis program. Hiring an AI researcher of Hooker’s caliber could also be tough within the present market given the skyrocketing demand for AI expertise.

However Pineau sees this as a possibility to “usher in a number of expertise,” noting that when she left Meta, a number of of her former colleagues recommended they’d observe her to a brand new AI lab. Nonetheless, she emphasised that Cohere has a strong base of AI researchers, and that it’s essential to not simply usher in anybody.

“Hiring a bunch of superstars doesn’t essentially make a celebrity group,” mentioned Pineau. “It’s actually about how the folks work collectively.”

In fact, Meta’s AI items immediately look very completely different in contrast with when Pineau was there just some months in the past. Over the summer time, Mark Zuckerberg went on a recruiting spree, reportedly providing a number of the business’s greatest AI researchers compensation packages north of $100 million to affix MSL. That prompted OpenAI to additionally increase compensation for its star staff, thus making it fairly tough for smaller gamers to land prime AI researchers.

As Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic throw billions of {dollars} at their AI efforts, Cohere is attempting to do extra with much less. For Pineau, that can imply making calculated analysis bets — the sort that may rapidly flip into compelling merchandise and maintain the corporate within the race.

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