Rising AI startup Cohere hires YouTube CFO Martin Kon as president

Ivan Zhang, Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, the co-founders of Cohere AI company, have hired YouTube CFO Martin Kon as their president and COO.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail

Toronto artificial-intelligence startup Cohere Inc. has hired YouTube chief financial officer Martin Kon to become its president and chief operating officer as the company tries to bring its high-profile language-processing tools to market.

Cohere specializes in large language models – AI that’s trained to digest text from across the internet to understand how to process and spurt out responses to prompts with increasing sophistication.

The language-processing field has gained increasing attention in recent weeks as well-known competitor OpenAI made its ChatGPT tool available to the public – leading people worldwide to give the tools endless combinations of commands and gawk at the humanlike, frequently accurate writing that it puts out.

At just three years old, Cohere has become a centrepiece of Toronto’s renowned AI community, hoping to put up a formidable challenge to the OpenAIs of the world. In a press release on Wednesday, the company framed Mr. Kon’s hiring as a significant step in that direction, saying he has “extensive experience delivering innovative products to market, optimizing existing ones, and creating new revenue streams.”

YouTube is a division of Alphabet Inc. GOOGL-Q subsidiary Google. Mr. Kon is a Boston Consulting Group alumni who went on to be YouTube’s vice-president of global strategy before becoming its CFO, and played a significant role in developing business lines such as Shorts, a service seen to be challenging the video platform TikTok.

In his new role, Mr. Kon hopes to persuade businesses to adopt Cohere’s language models as it tries to plant a stake in a market where heavily funded players such as Meta Platforms Inc., OpenAI and even his former employer Alphabet are trying to assert dominance.

In a video interview, Mr. Kon said he hopes to “enable the realization” of the “true business value” of the AI field of natural language processing, allowing it to be used by everyday businesses. Cohere has said that it hopes companies adopt its model for tasks including copywriting, content moderation and “conversational” AI, such as chatbots.

But Mr. Kon also said he hoped to work with both business leaders and their technical teams to frame Cohere’s services as a crucial tool in developers’ tool kits. This could be a chance for companies to use Cohere to suit their needs, rather than, he said, to “make a product, put it out there, and see if somebody is interested.”

Though moving from a Silicon Valley giant to a Toronto-based startup may seem unconventional, Mr. Kon is originally from neighbouring Oakville, Ont., and said he was enticed by the opportunity to try “building a new industry complementary to what Google does.” Both Google and Cohere also have close ties to Geoffrey Hinton, the Toronto-based professor and entrepreneur who is heralded as one of AI’s pioneers.

Earlier this week, Cohere released a multilingual model for understanding text that would work with more than 100 languages – significantly more than the handful of languages that most models work with, most notably English. Among other uses, the company said that the model would help users search for documents by meaning rather than keywords – a process that has had much success in English, but less so with other languages.

This is not the first time this year that a Canadian tech company poached a leader from Google. In October, Lightspeed Commerce Inc. said it had hired former Google Pay general manager Ryan Tabone to become its head of product.

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