Hustler Words – Cohere, the Canadian AI startup that once aimed to rival OpenAI and Anthropic, has made a significant move to bolster its AI capabilities. The company, which has secured roughly $1 billion in funding, has appointed Joelle Pineau, Meta’s former VP of AI Research, as its new Chief AI Officer. This high-profile hire comes as Cohere seeks to raise an additional $500 million at a $6.3 billion valuation, a substantial sum in a market dominated by giants with significantly larger war chests.
Pineau, a renowned AI scientist and McGill professor, played a crucial role in the development of Meta’s open Llama AI models. Her departure from Meta after eight years marks a major coup for Cohere. In her new role, Pineau will lead AI strategy across research, product, and policy teams, overseeing a shift towards more practical, enterprise-focused AI applications.
In an interview with hustlerwords.com, Pineau expressed enthusiasm for Cohere’s concentration on real-world enterprise solutions, contrasting it with the broader, often less defined, ambitions of some competitors pursuing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). She cited the recent, arguably underwhelming, launch of GPT-5 as evidence that the timeline for achieving AGI may be longer than anticipated. Pineau believes there’s significant potential for more immediately applicable AI models to drive productivity gains across various industries.
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Cohere’s current flagship product, North, is an AI agent platform designed for private deployment on enterprise infrastructure, addressing the privacy and security concerns of clients in banking and government. This strategy positions Cohere against both open-source providers and other companies offering similar solutions, but with a focus on enhanced support for private deployments. Pineau intends to direct more research towards enhancing North’s capabilities, developing benchmarks for evaluating secure AI agents, and exploring the interactions of AI agent networks.
This appointment follows the departure of Cohere’s VP of AI Research, Sara Hooker. While attracting top-tier AI talent is challenging in the current market, particularly with competitors like Meta offering massive compensation packages, Pineau is confident in her ability to build a strong team, emphasizing the importance of collaborative synergy over simply assembling a collection of "superstars." She aims to leverage her network and Cohere’s existing research foundation to make strategic research bets that translate quickly into compelling products. The race for AI dominance is far from over, and Cohere, with Pineau at the helm, is clearly aiming to stay competitive.
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