20VC: Cohere Founder on How Cohere Compete with OpenAI and Anthropic $BNs | Why Counties Should Fund Their Own Models & the Need for Model Sovereignty | How Sam Altman Has Done a Disservice to AI with Nick Frosst
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2025
⏱️ 68 minutes
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Summary
Nick Frosst is a Canadian AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as co-founder of Cohere, the enterprise-focused LLM. Cohere has raised over $900 million, most recently a $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. Under his leadership, Cohere hit $100M in ARR. Prior to founding Cohere, Nick was a researcher at Google Brain and a protégé of Geoffrey Hinton.
AGENDA:
00:00 – Biggest lessons from Geoff Hinton at Google Brain?
02:10 – Did Google completely sleep at the wheel and miss ChatGPT?
05:45 – Is data or compute the real bottleneck in AI's future?
07:20 – Does GPT5 Prove That Scaling Laws are BS?
13:30 – Are AI benchmarks just total BS?
17:00 – Would Cohere spend $5M on a single AI researcher?
19:40 – What is nonsense in AI that everyone is talking about?
25:30 – What is no one talking about in AI that everyone should be talking about?
33:00 – How do Cohere compete with OpenAI and Anthropic's billions?
44:30 – Why does being American actually hurt tech companies today?
45:10 – Should countries fund their own models? Is model sovereignty the future?
52:00 – Why has Sam Altman actually done a disservice to AI?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I don't think Sam Aldman has done a service to the world by talking about how close AGI is. |
| 0:06.1 | I think he has made several predictions now that are wrong and that were obviously wrong at the time he made them. |
| 0:10.8 | AI is going to kill the whole world in two years. |
| 0:12.9 | He did a world tour where he spoke to every major leader, the world over, to tell them, |
| 0:18.1 | hey, this technology is going to pose it an existential threat. And I think |
| 0:22.1 | that was academically disingenuous. And I think did a disservice to the technology he loves. |
| 0:27.2 | A lot of the world does not think scaling laws are super prevalent. This is 20 VC with me, Harry |
| 0:31.7 | Sabings. And today we are joined by Nick Frost, Canadian AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as |
| 0:36.7 | the co-founder of Cohere, |
| 0:38.2 | the Enterprise-focused LLM, who has raised over $900 million, most recently raising a $500 million |
| 0:44.2 | round, bringing their valuation to $6.8 billion. Today, we discuss how on earth they compete |
| 0:50.8 | when competing against the billions of dollars that Open AI and Anthropic have. |
| 0:56.0 | Cohere has hit 100 million in Enterprise ARR, and before founding Cohere, Nick was a researcher at Google Brain, |
| 1:03.0 | alongside the incredible Jeff Hinton. |
| 1:05.0 | But before we dive into the show stay, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. |
| 1:10.0 | What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects |
| 1:14.3 | that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools. |
| 1:17.9 | That's why we use Coda, the all-in-one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. |
| 1:26.3 | Offering the flexibility of docs with the |
| 1:28.6 | structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity. And their turnkey |
| 1:34.3 | AI solution, the intelligence of Coda brain, is a game changer. Powered by Grammally, |
| 1:39.6 | Coda is entering a new phase of innovation and expansion, aiming to redefine productivity for the AI era. |
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