Who is Aidan Gomez?

• Aidan Gomez is a computer scientist, ML researcher, and entrepreneur, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, is “interested in making massive neural networks more efficient, and getting them deployed at scale, out in the real world.”
• Gomez founded FOR.ai in June 2017 to help new AI researchers learn cutting-edge ML techniques, collaborate on international projects, access mentors and resources, and ultimately, break into the industry.
• Gomez founded Cohere in September 2019 and is the company’s current CEO. Cohere enables developers and enterprises to incorporate language AI into their offerings, with one notable client being Spotify.

Aidan Gomez is a computer scientist, ML researcher, and entrepreneur, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, is “interested in making massive neural networks more efficient, and getting them deployed at scale, out in the real world.”

Education

Gomez earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with Honours from the University of Toronto in 2018. He was also a teaching assistant and research intern that worked on supervised cipher cracking with generative adversarial networks (GANs).

At the time of writing, Gomez is completing a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Oxford. There, he is under the tutelage of Associate Professor of Machine Learning Yarin Gal and statistics professor and research scientist Yee Whye Teh.

FOR.ai

Gomez founded FOR.ai in June 2017 to help new AI researchers learn cutting-edge ML techniques, collaborate on international projects, access mentors and resources, and ultimately, break into the industry.

FOR.ai was established after Gomez wanted to start a bunch of new projects but did not have sufficient staff to help him. He later sent out a message to the University of Toronto’s computer science group chat and asked if anyone would like to collaborate.

The resultant team of five people was known as FOR.ai, and the group now has members from all over the world which includes personnel from Google Brain and other leading institutions.

Google Brain

For the first nine months of 2018, Gomez worked as an intern at Google Brain with the likes of Geoffrey Hinton and Kevin Swersky. Primarily, he worked on knowledge distillation of deep neural networks and multi-task learning. 

But Gomez had already spent a brief time at Google Brain the year before, taking time off from his undergraduate degree in Toronto to work at the company’s Silicon Valley campus. 

Whilst there, he co-authored the paper One Model To Learn Them All which showed that one neural network could perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Some of the other contributors to the research included Niki Parmar, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, and Lukasz Kaiser.

Between February and September 2019, Gomez transitioned to a student researcher on the Google Brain team in Berlin. There, he was involved with pathways and transformers for visual understanding and could count Jeff Dean and Jakob Uszkoreit among his colleagues.

Cohere

Gomez co-founded Cohere in September 2019 and is the company’s current CEO. Other co-founders include computer scientist Nick Frosst and current CTO Ivan Zhang, another computer scient who is also involved in FOR.ai.

In an interview with BNN Bloomberg, he explained that Cohere’s objective was “to help businesses build products, build software, that understands language.”

While ChatGPT and associated tech had seen mostly consumer use in the United States, Gomez was keen to use LLMs in business contexts where they could “increase [the] efficiency and productivity of workers.”

To that end, Cohere enables developers and enterprises to incorporate language AI into their offerings. One client is Spotify, which uses the company’s embedding model to enable user searches in 109 different languages. 

Key Highlights:

• Background and Education: Aidan Gomez is a computer scientist, machine learning researcher, and entrepreneur. He is particularly interested in optimizing and deploying large-scale neural networks in real-world applications. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with Honours from the University of Toronto in 2018 and is currently completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Oxford.
• FOR.ai: In June 2017, Gomez founded FOR.ai, a collaborative platform aimed at helping new AI researchers learn advanced machine learning techniques, collaborate on international projects, access mentors and resources, and break into the industry. The initiative started with a team of five members and has grown to include participants from around the world, including individuals from Google Brain and other prominent institutions.
• Google Brain: Gomez interned at Google Brain, where he worked on projects related to knowledge distillation of deep neural networks and multi-task learning. He also co-authored the research paper “One Model To Learn Them All,” demonstrating the capacity of a single neural network to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. He later transitioned to a student researcher role at Google Brain’s Berlin team, focusing on pathways and transformers for visual understanding.
• Cohere: In September 2019, Gomez co-founded Cohere and currently serves as the company’s CEO. Cohere’s mission is to help businesses incorporate language AI into their products and software. One of Cohere’s notable achievements is providing Spotify with an embedding model that enables user searches in 109 different languages. The company’s goal is to enhance efficiency and productivity by leveraging language AI in various business contexts.

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