Paris (France) (AFP) – Europe risks “total technological irrelevance” if it fails to develop sovereign capabilities, the head of Canadian AI startup Cohere warned Thursday on the sidelines of the Vivatech trade fair in Paris. Aidan Gomez spoke to AFP the day after a G7 meeting in Evian, eastern France, where he and other AI luminaries including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei were invited to join leaders of the world’s top industrial nations.
Without tech built on home soil, “your data, your productivity, your critical industries, your ability to defend yourself, it will be what others allow,” Gomez said. Vivatech has been overshadowed by European tech sovereignty concerns, after Anthropic withdrew access entirely to its most powerful models, Mythos and Fable, in response to a White House order that they be kept out of foreign hands.
“It’s like everyone got cold water splashed on their face,” Gomez said. He has striven to place Cohere as a sovereign alternative in both the European and Asian markets. The 2019-founded company builds AI models for businesses and governments, shunning the consumer applications explored by its giant American rivals. Instead, its offerings focus on concrete applications in health, finance, energy, and national security.
Truly sovereign capability requires “a set of technical guarantees,” Gomez said: “infrastructure that you control, that is run by a sovereign entity…meaning a company and champion within your nation.” As global tech firms scramble to respond to governments’ urgent quest to escape US or Chinese reach, many are offering solutions of their own marketed as “sovereign.” But “there’s so much sovereignty washing, where solutions that are not at all contributing to diversification or resilience are being painted in that light,” Gomez said.
Cohere does not operate its own data centres, planning instead to deploy its software on infrastructure owned by local companies like France’s Mistral or Germany’s Deutsche Telekom. Those AI models “require enormous resources” to develop, Gomez said. “Each country can’t build its own model, that’s the reality we have to face.”
“What we need are a number of champions distributed across democracies and then democracies collaborating together to build those champions up,” he urged.
Cohere sees Europe as a natural sphere of expansion in that light, as a “democratic stronghold” against the tech prowess of autocracies such as China. The Canadian company last month announced it was buying German startup Aleph Alpha with backing from both governments. With dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin, the merged entity is valued at around $20 billion. Since then it has also snapped up Canadian-German biomedical startup Reliant AI.
In May, it signed partnerships with Spanish firms Indra, a defense specialist, and Multiverse computing, which develops AI software. Canada and Europe have a “historic alignment (and) values alignment,” said Gomez, whose mother is British and father is Spanish. He himself lives in London, where Cohere recently beefed up its offices. The company now numbers around 700 staff and is preparing a new fundraising round.
Europe is Cohere’s second-largest region for revenue behind North America, Gomez said. “We’re seeing a rapid uptake” of AI in Europe, the CEO said. He added that he puts no stock in calls for a pause in AI development to properly weigh the technology’s dangers, issued in early June by American giants including OpenAI and Anthropic. “I think no one is going to pause. It’s a very silly posture. It’s not realistic,” he said. “If anything, Canada and Europe have to go much, much faster.”
© 2024 AFP
