Tired of AI doomsday tropes
Aidan Gomez was one of the Google engineers who first introduced a new artificial intelligence model called a transformer — the ‘T’ at the end of ChatGPT.
That set a foundation for a generative AI boom that ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and others built upon.
He’s now CEO of Cohere, a Toronto-based startup competing with other AI companies in supplying large language models to businesses. Gomez spoke with The Associated Press.
How is Cohere being used?
I have a favorite example in health care. Forty percent of a doctor’s working day is spent writing patient notes. What if we could have doctors attach a device to follow them between patient visits, listening into the conversation and pre-populating those notes. Instead of having to write it from scratch, there’s a first draft in there. They can read through and just make edits. Suddenly, the capacity of doctors boosts by a massive proportion.
How do you address AI models being prone to ‘hallucinations’ (errors)?
It leads to a bad product experience. For hallucinations, we have a core focus on RAG, which is retrieval-augmented generation. We just released a new model called Command R. It lets you connect the model to private sources of trusted knowledge. That might be your organization’s internal documents or a specific employee’s emails. It can cite back to where it got that information. You can check its work.
What are big misconceptions about AI?
The fear that certain individuals and organizations espouse about this technology being a terminator, an existential risk. Those are stories humanity has told itself for decades. Technology taking over and displacing us, rendering us subservient. We pay a lot of attention to it because it’s so gripping as a story. The reality is I think this technology is going to be profoundly good. Those of us developing the technology are very aware of and working to mitigate the risks. We all want the technology to be additive to humanity, not a threat to it.
Major tech companies say they’re trying to build artificial general intelligence (broadly better-than-human AI). Is AGI part of your mission?
No, I don’t see it as part of my mission. For me, AGI isn’t the end goal. The end goal is profound positive impact for the world with this technology. It’s a very general technology. It’s reasoning, it’s intelligence. It applies all over the place. We want to make sure it’s the most effective form of the technology it possibly can be, as early as it possibly can be. It’s not some pseudo-religious pursuit of AGI, which we don’t even really know the definition of.
What’s next?
Everyone should keep their eyes on more agent-like behavior. You can say, ‘Hey model, I just built this. Here’s what it does. Here’s how you interact with it.’ If you give them access to tools, they can take action out in the real world on your behalf.