Oracle adopts Cohere’s AI technology to revolutionize its services, setting the startup on a competitive edge against OpenAI. Learn more about this groundbreaking alliance.
Key Takeaways:
As the AI world grows more competitive, Oracle takes an ambitious leap by collaborating with a relatively obscure startup, Cohere. This decision might surprise many, but Cohere, with its innovative AI technology, is giving OpenAI – the industry’s current kingpin – a run for its money.
Formed just four years ago, the Toronto-based Cohere has quickly caught the tech world’s attention. In August, the startup secured a whopping $270 million in a Series C funding round, reaching a valuation of $2 billion. The investment came from renowned VCs and tech powerhouses such as Oracle, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and SentinelOne, following a previous $170 million raised from prominent Silicon Valley VCs and acclaimed AI researchers.
Oracle’s decision to integrate Cohere’s generative AI technology into its vast range of products showcases a symbiotic partnership. Cohere is also capitalizing on Oracle’s cloud services for the training, creation, and deployment of its generative AI models. This collaborative strategy echoes Microsoft’s association with OpenAI but with some crucial differences.
Cohere’s architecture is inherently designed for enterprise customers. This provides companies the liberty to utilize their own data to train AI models, ensuring their data remains confidential. For instance, Oracle leverages its own data, following its acquisition of the major healthcare cloud provider Cerner, to train Cohere for medical and first-responder professionals.
“Cohere and Oracle are working together to make it very, very easy for enterprise customers to train their own specialized large language models while protecting the privacy of their training data,” commented Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman, and CTO.
Contrarily, OpenAI gathers data from various sources, including users’ data, for its training models. While this approach raises privacy concerns, Cohere’s business model offers a fresh, user-centric perspective on AI data usage.
Though Oracle is Cohere’s major partner, the AI startup is not restricted to Oracle exclusively. Salesforce, another investor in Cohere, integrates Cohere’s chat capabilities into its own services, thereby diversifying Cohere’s market reach.
Oracle, despite having some of its homegrown AI technology, presently relies on Cohere to power its generative AI services. While this dynamic may evolve, the Oracle-Cohere partnership highlights Oracle’s adaptive AI strategy.
Perhaps the key reason behind Cohere’s fast rise lies in its founding team. Aidan Gomez, co-founder of Cohere and a former research intern at Google Brain, co-authored a transformative AI training method named “transformers” in 2017. This technique has since become a cornerstone for many large-language, generative AI tech, including those utilized by OpenAI.
Co-founders Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang, and Gomez launched Cohere in 2019, with a vision to democratize AI. As Salesforce Ventures rightly describes, Cohere aims to “bring Google-quality AI to the masses.” Now, with Oracle’s partnership, they are poised to redefine AI for enterprise customers.
