Cohere sees big AI opportunity in enterprise, away from ChatGPT [Video]

Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst is surrounded by chatter about artificial general intelligence, or AGI. He’s perfectly happy to stay out of the conversation.

Founded in 2019, by ex-Google AI researchers, Cohere is valued in the billions of dollars and is one of the more high-profile names in the world of generative AI, which has exploded since OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in late 2022.

But it’s not a company that’s well known among consumers, who have swarmed to chatbots and other tools from OpenAI, Google and Perplexity. Rather, Cohere is all about business.

“I’m in meetings with companies in health care, banking and IT all the time,” Frosst told CNBC in an interview this week. “The questions I get are about securely automating tasks like HR, payrolls, research and fraud detection to drive productivity. No one has ever asked me about achieving AGI, let alone ASI.”

The latter is short for artificial superintelligence, or AI that significantly …