A Cohere Founder on What A.I. Critics Get Wrong

A Cohere Founder on What A.I. Critics Get Wrong

From CANADALAND by CANADALAND

June 8, 2026 · 31 min · Episode 1378

About this episode

Nick Frosst discusses Canada's A.I. sector and the unique approach of Cohere.

Last week, Mark Carney announced his big A.I. strategy. Two billion dollars to support creating jobs, providing free A.I. literacy training, and protection against some of the potential harms and risks around A.I., especially with kids. Oh, and he wants to build a world-leading supercomputer.  Canada's leading A.I. company is Cohere. Cohere isn't like OpenAI or xAI or Anthropic or any of those other well-known large language model companies. They're not public facing. They don't do image generation or music generation, or tell you what recipe you can make with the leftovers in your fridge. They develop private models for specific companies trained in part on that company's private data. RBC, Bell, Salesforce, just to name a few. Their current valuation sits at $7 billion.  Cohere's co-founder is a 33 year-old indie rockstar named Nick Frosst. He joins host Stephen Marche to discuss Canada's A.I. sector, his band, Star Trek, and those students booing A.I. at convocations. Host: Stephen Marche Credits: Tristan Capacchione (Producer), Bruce Thorson (Senior Producer), max collins (Director of Audio), Jesse Brown (Editor and Publisher) Fact checking by Julian Abraham Photo…

People in this episode

Host: Stephen Marche

Guest: Nick Frosst

Topics covered

  • A.I. strategy
  • Cohere
  • Canada's A.I. sector
  • private models
  • job creation
  • A.I. literacy

Keywords

  • A.I.
  • Cohere
  • Mark Carney
  • Nick Frosst
  • Canada
  • private models
  • job creation
  • A.I. literacy

Sponsors

Fizz, Douglas

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cohere, RBC, Bell, Salesforce

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