Aidan Gomez contributed to the invention of the transformer at Google. At Cohere, he is now introducing AI to businessw

Aidan Gomez is a Google intern In 2017, he helped co-author the paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the concept of transformers and ultimately started the generative artificial intelligence craze.

"No one working in this field at the time could have predicted the capabilities of our technology," Gomez told CNBC in a recent interview. "These models are doing things that I personally think I might want to see at the end of my career, maybe 40 years from now."

Gomez, a computer science student at the University of Toronto at the time of his internship, left Google in 2021 to co-found Cohere, an Nvidia-backed artificial intelligence startup

The company has reportedly raised $5 billion in funding. Cohere makes generative AI models that businesses can use, as opposed to consumer-facing products like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

“We’re having research come out of MIT and Harvard showing the productivity gains,” Gomez said. “You can just quantitatively measure it. You sit a knowledge worker next to one of the models. You train them how to use it, how to make it work for them. They have to learn how to use this technology, but once they do, productivity increases by about 40%.

In June 2023, Cohere raised $270 million from investors including Salesforce and Oracle at a $2.2 billion valuation. Cohere executives even participated in a White House forum on artificial intelligence. Until recently, Gomez said, "everything was done by about five people. Today, Cohere has about 400 employees and is rapidly growing its sales team."

When asked about specific use cases where generative AI could benefit businesses, Gomez cited a model Cohere has built to help insurance companies. The technology allows the company to submit faster bids to beat the competition when a proposal is requested from a mining or pipeline company.

Gomez called it a run. "The first insurance company to make a reasonable offer will win the contract," he said. "We've added their actuaries, and those are the people who do the research on the projects, assess the risks and issue the quotes."

By speeding up its actuaries, Gomez said, the company was able to win more contracts. "I never imagined that an insurance company planning natural resource plans would use large language patterns," he said. "But they are."