In case you missed the big news, the US government just ordered Anthropic to ban foreign access to its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. In response, Anthropic removed access to those models for everyone.
“If your entire technology is coming from a single country, and that country decides that every now and again they’re going to shut off access to you, that’s not a foundation you can build on.”
Nick Frosst
Cohere
The decision has sent shockwaves throughout the industry and prompted an important question of who should ultimately control the frontier tech. That question is top of mind for Canada’s AI champion, Cohere, which has said that it has seen a “huge number” of inbound requests after what happened to Anthropic.
Why? Well, according to this week’s guest, Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst, Cohere is simply built different compared to other global AI giants: they’re not trying to be huge, they don’t sell to consumers, and they’re not trying to build a digital god. They also don’t control their customers’ use of their models and have recently open-sourced several of them.
You might call it a more ‘Canadian’ approach to large language models, and as we noted in our BetaKit Most Ambitious feature on Cohere, both the Canadian flag and Cohere’s approach have been good for business lately.
On this week’s episode, Frosst and I get into all of that, including what it means to be Canada’s AI champion, and how Star Trek informs the AI future the company is trying to build.
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This episode was recorded during Toronto Tech Week, before the Anthropic news broke. But you’ll note that Frosst had some interesting things to say about the company, as well as other AI peers in the space—including techno-optimist investor Marc Andreessen and his claims that the industry has already surpassed AGI.
And crucially, we also discuss what it means for everyone when all your technology comes from a single country—that can shut off your access at a moment’s notice.
So, did the Anthropic model ban just prove Cohere right?
Let’s dig in.
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Recorded and edited by Toronto Podcasts. BetaKit is a Toronto Tech Week media partner.