AI startup Cohere CEO says US holds edge over China in AI race

By Deborah Mary Sophia, Juby Babu and Krystal Hu

Dec 4 (Reuters) – Canadian tech startup Cohere’s CEO Aidan Gomez said on Thursday the U.S. and Canada hold an “incredible position” to partner with economies adopting AI around the ​world, putting the countries in the lead against China in the global AI race.

Speaking in an interview at ‌the Reuters NEXT conference in New York, Gomez noted China has put out extremely high-performing AI models, narrowing the gap between some of the best closed-source large ‌language models, such as OpenAI‘s.

But “the thing that actually matters is who is the primary service provider of this technology – it’s not who gets the technology first, but who commercializes it at scale. The U.S. and Canada sit in an incredible position to be the world’s partner in adopting this technology,” Gomez said.

“I think we will win against China.”

The AI arms race between the U.S. and China has ⁠heated up this year after Chinese AI ‌startup DeepSeek surged to popularity early in January. Since then, tech giants in China including Alibaba and Baidu have been racing to roll out new models and upgrades to AI products more frequently.

To fuel ‍America’s ambitious goals of being an AI frontrunner, Big Tech and AI companies in the U.S. have poured billions of dollars to boost computing capacity and their AI infrastructures.

Gomez’s comments are a complete contrast to recent ones from AI chipmaker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who warned China was “nanoseconds ​behind America in AI” and was “going to win the AI race.” China’s access to advanced AI chips, particularly those produced by ‌Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, remains a flashpoint in its tech rivalry with the United States.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES NOT WILLING TO USE CHINESE TECHNOLOGY

Gomez added that liberal democracies around the world tend not to be very willing to use Chinese technology as critical infrastructure in their economies: “If you’re going to pick a partner to rely on to transform your entire economy, I think you will pick a liberal democracy.”

Toronto-based Cohere builds enterprise-specific AI models.

“Spending an incremental $10 billion a year to improve your model ⁠does not deliver the return on investment on the technology itself to ​justify that … over the past few years, since there’s been all of this ​scaling, we’re seeing a slowdown in the improvement of the models,” Gomez said.

The comments come at a time when tech investors are increasingly demanding companies like Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google show better returns on ‍the hundreds of billions of dollars ⁠they have collectively spent on AI.

While companies’ efforts to reach artificial super-intelligence have scaled higher in recent years, so have concerns around the risks of such advanced AI technologies.

“I personally don’t believe a lot of these stories of ‘Terminators’ and ⁠doomsdays and these sort of sci-fi narratives that emerged,” Gomez said.

“They’ve since become unpopular, because people have been faced with the reality of the AI ‌technology.”

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(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in ‌Bengaluru and Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Chris Reese)