Canada’s AI leader doesn’t want to be a runner-up in the AI race, and is making a big move to prove that it's serious about winning.
What happened: Cohere and its German equivalent Aleph Alpha have agreed to the terms of a merger, five months after first announcing their intention to join forces. The deal needs to pass regulatory approval, though it already has the blessing of both nations’ governments.
While framed as a merger, the deal will see Cohere take over Aleph Alpha, with the entity keeping the Cohere name and CEO Aidan Gomez staying at the helm. The deal will give Cohere a European HQ and expand its workforce to more than 1,000.
Why it matters: Cohere has made its name by focusing on sector-specific use cases rather than general-purpose products, but if it wants to truly run with the big dogs Anthropic and OpenAI, it needs to scale up. The merger, and the push to own “sovereign AI,” is part of this.
Cohere seeks to capitalize on growing trepidation among enterprise customers about overdependence on U.S. and Chinese labs and the implications it has for their data.
The company claims to offer total control as it allows clients to run models on their own AI infrastructure — Aleph Alpha is already doing a similar thing in Europe.
Yes, but: For this strategy to work, Cohere needs to drastically boost its compute and raise more awareness about what sovereign AI actually entails. Per a recent survey sponsored by Cohere, more than half of execs said sovereign AI is a top priority, but a third of them couldn’t describe what it meant and just 13% said their organizations grasped the concept.—QH
