Aidan Gomez is a British-Canadian computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, with a focus on natural language processing. He is the co-founder and CEO of the technology company Cohere, an enterprise-focused firm that develops large language models and AI tools for businesses. Gomez gained prominence as one of the co-authors of the 2017 research paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer (architecture) architecture, a foundational technology for modern generative AI systems.
Gomez grew up in Brighton, Ontario, and pursued academic training in computer science and mathematics. His career spans research at Google Brain and entrepreneurship, with Cohere emerging as a major player in the AI industry. He has also contributed to open-source AI initiatives and has been recognized on influential lists in the field.
Early life and education
Gomez was raised in Brighton, Ontario, Canada. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics. He later enrolled in a PhD program in computer science at the University of Oxford, where his research focused on machine learning and natural language processing. He paused his doctoral studies to launch Cohere in 2019 and was granted the PhD in 2024.
Career and research
In 2017, as a 20-year-old intern at Google Brain, Gomez was one of eight authors of the paper "Attention Is All You Need." The paper proposed the transformer, a novel deep learning architecture that enables neural networks to analyze large datasets for patterns and make predictions while leveraging GPU parallelization. This architecture has been widely adopted for training large language models and in the development of generative AI, influencing subsequent systems such as those from OpenAI and Anthropic.
In the same year, Gomez founded FOR.ai, a program to help researchers learn machine learning techniques in a collaborative format. An outgrowth of this project was Cohere For AI (now Cohere Labs), which released Aya, an open-source multilingual large language model. As a PhD student, Gomez also worked as a machine learning researcher at Google Brain, where he co-authored the paper "One Model to Learn Them All" about multi-task learning by a single neural network.
In 2019, Gomez left Google Brain to launch Cohere, an enterprise-focused company that helps businesses implement AI into chatbots, search engines, and other products. As of September 2025, Cohere has raised about US$1.6 billion at a valuation north of $7 billion, with Gomez leading the company as its CEO. In April 2026, Cohere acquired Aleph Alpha, a German AI company, creating a combined company with a $20 billion valuation.
Recognition and leadership
Gomez was named to the 2023 Time 100/AI list of the most influential people in the field of artificial intelligence. He and his fellow Cohere founders Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst were named number 1 on the 2023 Maclean's AI Trailblazers Power List. In April 2025, Gomez was elected to the board of Rivian, an electric vehicle manufacturer, reflecting his broader influence in technology and industry.
Views on AI
Gomez has stated that warnings regarding the existential risk from artificial intelligence are overblown, and that real risks involve the automated spread of misinformation on social media. He has also expressed that the United States would win the AI arms race over China, a view that aligns with his focus on practical applications and enterprise adoption of AI technologies.
Legacy and impact
The transformer architecture co-authored by Gomez has become a cornerstone of modern AI, enabling advances in sequence-to-sequence models, multi-head attention, and positional encoding. His work at Cohere has contributed to the commercialization of AI, with applications in Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud ecosystems. Gomez's trajectory from academic research to industry leadership illustrates the convergence of foundational research and entrepreneurial innovation in the AI field.