Toronto-based AI scaleup Cohere is seeing more interest from potential customers after the US government blocked access to Anthropic’s latest large language model.
The news: Cohere chief AI officer Joelle Pineau told Bloomberg Tech host Ed Ludlow on Monday that enterprise and government customers want control over a predictable tech stack, and that the US government’s recall of Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 introduced volatility.
As a result, Cohere has been hearing more from companies, government, and even investors looking for advice, Pineau said.
From the source: Cohere has had a “huge number of inbounds: it’s coming from business customers who are looking to diversify the set of technology that they can rely on, both for the core models … and for the orchestration and governance platform,” Pineau said. Cohere has also had a “large number of inbounds from governments around the world; especially outside of [the] US and China, governments are concerned about their own ability to access the technology.”
Following the thread: Last week, Anthropic disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all customers to comply with an export control order from the US government that cited national security concerns. Anthropic said the government directive contained no specific national security details, but speculated that the decision stemmed from awareness of a method to narrowly jailbreak its Fable 5 model.
Final thought: Cohere has been positioning itself for a moment like this. The company is often referred to as Canada’s AI champion, and markets its offering as a sovereign alternative to the US-based AI model providers, giving its customers control through on-premises deployment.
Cohere also isn’t the only one benefiting from the sudden volatility. Toronto-based AI company Augure said it’s also seeing a large increase in emails and inbound requests since Fable 5 was pulled offline.
With files from Sarah Rieger and Douglas Soltys.
Feature image courtesy Wikimeida Commons. Photo by Gabriel Hutchinson, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.