Aidan joined this week’s Unsupervised Learning for a wide-ranging conversation on model architectures, enterprise adoption, and what’s breaking in the foundation model stack. If you’re building or investing in AI infrastructure, Aidan is worth listening to. He co-authored the original Transformer paper, leads one of the most advanced model labs outside of the hyperscalers, and is now building for real-world enterprise deployment with Cohere’s agent platform, North. Cohere serves thousands of customers across sectors like finance, telco, and healthcare — and they’ve made a name for themselves by staying model-agnostic, privacy-forward, and deeply international (with major bets in Japan and Korea) (0:00) Intro (0:32) Enterprise AI (3:23) Custom Integrations and Future of AI Agents (4:33) Enterprise Use Cases for Gen AI (7:02) The Importance of Reasoning in AI Models (10:38) Custom Models and Synthetic Data (17:48) Cohere's Approach to AI Applications (23:24) Future Use Cases and Market Fit (27:11) Building a Unified Automation Platform (27:34) Strategic Decisions in the AI Journey (29:19) International Partnerships and Language Models (31:05) Future of Foundation Models (32:27) AI in Specialized Domains (34:40) Challenges in Data Integration (35:06) Emerging Foundation Model Companies (35:31) Technological Frontiers and Architectures (37:29) Scaling Hypothesis and Model Capabilities (42:26) AI Research Culture and Team Building (44:39) Future of AI and Societal Impact (48:31) Addressing AI Risks With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
