Cohere Founder, Nick Frosst: How To Compete with OpenAI & Anthropic, and Sam Altman’s AI Disservice

Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst argues Sam Altman’s AGI hype was academically disingenuous and that GPT-5 was actually worse than GPT-4 as a product.

• Nick Frosst says GPT-5 is worse than GPT-4 because auto model-selection is slow, cumbersome, and gets routing wrong.
• Sam Altman’s world tour warning world leaders of AI existential risk was ‘academically disingenuous’ and a disservice to the technology.
• Cohere trains on synthetic data from fake companies, fake emails, and fake internal APIs to optimize for enterprise tool use.
• AI benchmarks like ARC-AGI (pixel manipulation) and math reasoning evals are gameable and irrelevant to actual enterprise use cases.
• Cohere’s Canadian identity is a sales asset: non-US companies seek alternatives as US government influence over American tech grows.
• Frosst would spend $5M on a single AI researcher if they brought sufficient value; confirmed Cohere hired Joel Pino from Meta.
• Sovereign models are like national infrastructure — countries should build LLMs in their own language and cultural context.
• Frosst’s boldest 2026 prediction: AI reliably handles multi-step enterprise tasks like expense filing end-to-end without human intervention.

2025-09-01 · Watch on YouTube