Oracle is partnering with Cohere, a Toronto-based AI startup, to offer its enterprise customers a way to build their own generative AI apps without having to share their data in ways they may not want to do. Cohere offers a viable alternative to the dominant player, OpenAI, and is designed for enterprise customers to help companies train their AI models using their own data, without sharing it.
Cohere recently raised $270 million in a series C funding round from a host of VCs and big tech names, including Oracle, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and SentinelOne. Oracle will be embedding Cohere’s generative AI technology into several of its products, while Cohere will be using Oracle’s cloud to train, build, and deploy its generative AI models.
The partnership looks very much like how Microsoft has invested in and is using OpenAI. However, there are several differences. Cohere is designed for enterprise customers, meaning they can use their own data to train their AI models without sharing that data. In contrast, OpenAI has famously scooped up data from everywhere to train its chatbots, including Reddit.
Cohere doesn’t have an exclusivity contract with Oracle. Fellow investor Salesforce, for instance, already offers a service that embeds Cohere’s chat capabilities into Salesforce. Oracle does have some of its own homegrown AI technology, but at the moment, Cohere is the only partner Oracle announced to power its generative AI services for customers, though this could change one day.
Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a paper on a way of training AI models to improve their abilities to understand language while he was a research intern at Google Brain in 2017. That method, called transformers, has become the basis for many of the large-language, generative AI tech that has become so popular today, including some models used by OpenAI. Along with co-founders and fellow AI experts Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, Gomez founded Cohere in 2019 to bring Google-quality AI to the masses, as Salesforce Ventures describes in a blog post, and Oracle is helping lead the way for its enterprise customers.
