Aidan Gomez

Aidan Gomez grew up off the grid on a maple-syrup farm in rural Ontario and, as a 20-year-old Google Brain intern in 2017, co-authored “Attention Is All You Need” — the Transformer paper, written with Noam Shazeer and six others, that became the foundation of modern AI. After doctoral work at Oxford he co-founded Cohere in Toronto in 2019 with Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang.

Against the doom industry

Cohere builds enterprise language models — deliberately unflashy AI for banks, telcos, and governments — and Gomez has matched that pragmatism with public combativeness toward AI doomerism. He dismissed the 2023 pause letter as fantastical, telling the Financial Times its superintelligence-takeover scenario was exceptionally improbable, and told Fortune that debating human extinction was “an absurd use of our time.” The real risks, he argues, are concrete and present: scalable bot farms flooding social media with indistinguishable synthetic voices, misinformation, and sloppy deployment in high-stakes settings.

After the OpenAI board crisis of November 2023 he broadened the attack, criticizing effective altruism’s grip on AI-safety discourse. Critics respond that a CEO whose business depends on AI adoption has an obvious interest in playing down existential concerns — a charge Gomez counters by noting he has been equally blunt about AI’s near-term harms, and that his stated goal is technology that is “additive to humanity.”