The Other Stuff #29 — Aidan Gomez: Empathy and Conviction

Aidan Gomez (@aidangomez) is a computer scientist, co-author of the seminal paper ‘Attention Is All You Need,’ and the CEO of Cohere. In this episode, we discussed his upbringing in the cabin his grandfather built in Codrington, a small town North of Brighton, and the values that were instilled in him through his family. We explored his path from Codrington to his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, emailing Geoffrey Hinton, and joining Google Brain where he co-wrote the paper on transformers. We discussed how he met his co-founders Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, and his insights on what it means to build a meaningful, successful company in Canada. Aidan shares his conviction about what is at stake—for Canada and for the world at large. This is a conversation about family, values, and what it means to live with conviction. The Other Stuff is hosted by internetVin⁠, filmmaker and entrepreneur and possibly the most curious man on Earth. Produced by New. — Timestamps 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:10 The Malleability of Toronto 00:11:06 Growing Up in Codrington 00:13:50 The Story of Aidan Gomez’s Family 00:27:23 Introduction to the Internet 00:30:39 Values and Work Ethic 00:35:46 University of Toronto’s AI Scene 00:40:48 Emailing Geoffrey Hinton 00:42:16 Google Brain 00:45:15 Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting 00:49:48 The Beauty of Research 00:54:24 One Model to Rule Them All 00:59:54 Meeting Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst 01:04:00 The Birth of Cohere 01:06:56 Twitter Influencers and Alex Friedland 01:11:48 Being the CEO 01:12:51 Building for Canada 01:15:01 Three Fundamental Ingredients of Building a Company 01:21:39 Working with the Canadian Government 01:24:39 Reflexivity in Canada 01:36:22 What Is Evil? 01:42:40 The Role of AI in the World — The Other Stuff Podcast: https://otherstuffpod.com  YouTube: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK0osV4LBB6zLfDk-KDV9FtDg7y0bJ3AW Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1kImmU1R1DYTeM1AKZRWkx?si=2feeadb93ad4419f Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-other-stuff-with-internetvin/id1828762531 Twitter: https://x.com/otherstuffpod Instagram: https://instagram.com/otherstuffpod internetVin ⁠ https://x.com/internetvin New https://x.com/newsystems_ https://instagram.com/newsystems_