Yeah, and then the Canadian government handed hundreds of millions to the kids at Cohere who have now gone spent it on Coreweave. When it was all announced I was very very vocal that using an inexperienced startup for the sovereign compute capabilities seemed a very poor choice. I'm so curious to see how this all plays out.
I think we know how it plays out. In a couple of years, someone is going to have to swoop in and save CoreWeave’s customers and consultants will be lined up for that “transformation”.
But imagine all the data, tech and data center companies simultaneously go into receivership. Farfetched, but indulge the fantasy.
At that moment what choice would the government have but to conduct a rescue that at least keeps the lights on, and probably more? What’s the alternative? Extensive data losses, business interruptions— if just a couple of those key companies spontaneously stopped operating, chaos.
If the companies run cash flow positive absent debt service (I assume this is the case), the creditors will be in charge, they can put up more $, or get a loan while they re-structure the company. Either they end up owning it, or they sell it. This can happen to a bunch of companies at the same time.
There would not really be a huge rush if they are cashflow positive, they can take their time.
> When it was all announced I was very very vocal that using an inexperienced startup for the sovereign compute capabilities seemed a very poor choice.
Cohere raised from Nvidia. Cohere spends on Coreweave. Coreweave raised from Nvidia and buys Nvidia chips.
No, it's not "corruption". It's that very little real money changes hands. The smaller investors and debt providers get sucked into funding it but that's about it.
You get GPU rentals. Not the actual billions raised they claim. So it's just creative accounting to count the same money 2-4x.
Hah. Well, back in ~2004 we had a different name for "creative accounting" to generate "revenue" while very little money chnages hands. Back then we called it fraud. But I guess terminology changes.
This kind of circular deals are very common and doesn't violate any laws. It's the magnitude and prevalence of it in the AI sector that flashes a warning sign.
A lot of stuff doesn't violate any laws until it does. Laws are created after the crimes have already happened. That's why we have the letter of law vs the spirit of the law.
I'm Canadian and I built DigitalOcean, there is a data center in Toronto because I decided. I am one of many Canadians who have built scaled infrastructure and think this is a nightmare. Many competent people at telus and bell behind the scenes believe it or not. They should have, and still should, form a crown corp and get a bunch of us older infrastructure people to help put it together. We have crown corps for this very purpose, from my understanding the people in the rooms calling the shots had little to no experience architecting large scale physical data center build outs. Cohere, or any startups should be stakeholders, but the infra should have been home grown.
I'm not opposed to CrownCorps and regulated energy markets. The most recent rumblings in the US clamor for govt. infra stepin to compete with China on power/permitting intervention. Makes sense.
That said, Cohere only got a couple hundred million from CA and the DC is being built "domestic" in CA.
That's not enough?
Sounds like you're knowledgeable about the skills gap of do-ers in CA govt, but I'd be concerned about wasting even more time/$ through incompetence. And a politician would be staked on its outcome. That's too much political risk.
I don't have a good idea of what happened inside or what they could have done differently, but I do remember them going from a world-leading LLM AI lab to selling embeddings to enterprise.
Cohere is doing a lot of enterprise AI business, and a lot of business directly with the federal government. They are also not juiced up in these financial games that OpenAI or Oracle are playing.
Additionally, Cohere is no less “kids” than Anthropic or OpenAI. Aidan was literally one of the co-authors of “Attention is all you need”.
No doubt some amazing engineer's work there, but there are little to no adults in the room at that business as far as I can see, and sure they like to tweet about how well they are doing, and I keep hearing this line that they're selling to enterprise, uh, who, Canadian tire? If they actually have more than $150mm in revenue I'd be amazed, and $150mm revenue is still, not at all impressive.
>The authors of the paper are: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. All eight authors were "equal contributors" to the paper; the listed order was randomized.
Intern or not, it still sounds like he contributed substantially.
