Aidan Gomez

An intern on the Transformer paper

Gomez took his bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto, where Roger Grosse supervised him. He then interned at Google Brain with Łukasz Kaiser and Geoffrey Hinton, and later returned as a student researcher working with Jakob Uszkoreit and Jeff Dean.78

In 2017 he was a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need", the paper that introduced the Transformer. It reported 28.4 BLEU on WMT 2014 English-to-German translation and 41.8 on English-to-French.23

Oxford, For.ai and a company in Toronto

Oxford lists his doctoral period as 2018 to 2023, under Yarin Gal and Yee Whye Teh. Before Cohere he led a research group called For.ai.78

Cohere began in Toronto in 2019. Gomez says he met his co-founder Nick Frosst at Google Brain: "That's where I met one of my co-founders Nick Frosst, and we created Cohere".14

A model factory for business customers

Gomez pitches Cohere as a supplier to companies, not consumers. In a 2024 interview published by Oracle he said the partnership "really lives up to our mission of building large language models for enterprise in a way that is hyperprotective of their data". Oracle gave Cohere engineers access to its AI-ready compute clusters.4

The company calls itself a "model factory" that updates its models frequently.4

Calling for a human in the loop

In a February 2025 essay on Cohere's blog, Gomez wrote: "It is time for us to be serious and deliberate in addressing the clearest and most pressing risks that AI presents." He argued that in areas such as healthcare and law AI "cannot be deployed without the oversight and safeguards of having a human-in-the-loop."12

His views on AI risk have also brought a public row. In a November 2023 letter to Cohere staff, Bloomberg reported and PYMNTS relayed, he criticised the effective altruism movement for what he saw as its "self-righteousness".11

Fourteen publishers against Cohere

On 13 February 2025 fourteen publishers sued Cohere in the Southern District of New York, case 1:25-cv-01305, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. They alleged that Cohere used scraped copies of their articles in training, real-time use and outputs without permission or compensation. The suit is against the company. A docket summary lists Cohere Inc. as the only defendant.515

Cohere said it "strongly stands by its practices" for responsibly training its enterprise AI, and a spokesperson called the suit "misguided and frivolous". On 13 November 2025 the court denied Cohere's partial motion to dismiss. Loeb & Loeb said the direct infringement, secondary infringement and trademark claims survived. The same docket summary shows the case open with no settlement recorded.6131415

Gomez, year by year

1. Jun 2017

   Co-authored "Attention Is All You Need" while a Google intern23

2. 2018

   Began doctoral study at Oxford, which lists his PhD period as 2018 to 202378

3. 2019

   Founded Cohere in Toronto with Nick Frosst, whom he met at Google Brain14

4. 2021

   Co-authored a Nature paper on disease variant prediction with deep generative models; a publisher correction followed910

5. 2023

   Finished his Oxford doctorate7

6. Nov 2023

   Criticised the effective altruism movement in a letter to Cohere staff, as reported by Bloomberg11

7. Feb 2024

   Described Cohere's work with Oracle in an Oracle interview4

8. Feb 2025

   Published an essay on AI risk on Cohere's blog12

9. Feb 2025

   Fourteen publishers sued Cohere in the Southern District of New York5

10. Nov 2025

    The court denied Cohere's partial motion to dismiss that suit1314

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