Cohere hires longtime metal research head Joelle Pineau as the best AI executive

Investors once poured around $1 billion into CEO Aidan Gomez as a promising candidate for Canadian AI startups to challenge Openai and humanity in the race to build frontier AI models.

However, Cohere’s AI model has fallen to the forefront and its business has not expanded like its competitors.

Now, the company is inviting veteran research leaders to revamp their AI efforts. Cohere hired Joelle Pineau, the former vice president of AI research for AI research, who previously oversaw Tech Giant’s Basic AI Research (FAIL) lab. In the newly created role of AI executives, Pineau oversees AI strategies across Cohere’s research, product and policy team.

Pineau, a Canadian AI scientist and Professor McGill, along with Yang Lekun, a pioneer in neural networks, helped guide the early development of Meta’s open llama AI models. Pineau left Meta in May after nearly eight years at work.

For Co-Here, this is a massive employment, staunching hopes to help veterans with more research breakthroughs, improve their research and product pipelines, and employ top talent.

Employment comes at a pivotal moment in Cohere. The company raised $500 million at a valuation of $6.8 billion. Startivelisond is that Startup is not competing with Openai, Google, Meta, Anthropic, etc.

But its rivals are trying to develop AI systems that suit (or exceed) human performance on a variety of tasks, but Cohere has a narrower focus. The startup mainly builds AI applications that can solve practical problems for businesses and government agencies, highlighting privacy and security.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Pineau said that Cohere’s focus on real-world enterprise applications is something she’s excited about. “Many players who are very focused on AGI, Superintelligence and others have hinted at companies like Meta, a former employer who recently invested billions in new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) units. “They don’t necessarily understand what this AI is being used for.”

She pointed out the launch of the GPT-5 Openai last week. This was overwhelming as evidence that the timeline for achieving AGI might be “a little longer than we thought”. In the meantime, Pineau says there is plenty of room for more practical AI models to make productivity leaps in various industries.

Pineau, a native of Canada, has been looking at Cohere since its founding in 2019 and said it is excited to contribute to the company that its founder is based in his home country.

Beyond patriotism, Pineau feels that the opportunity with Colles is a good opportunity to venture beyond research. At the fair, Pineau oversaw a research team working on a project that took 18 months to 10 years. Now she works within a much more stringent timeline and participates in customers and products. And while Cohere has fewer resources than Meta, Pineau said she will become more agile in her new role.

Cohere’s latest product is an AI agent platform called “the ability for businesses and government agencies to personally deploy on their own infrastructure.” This is an attractive concept for many customers, banks and federal organizations that process highly sensitive data. This allows you to compete with open source providers such as DeepSeek and Meta. Cohere bets that by providing more support for private deployments, it can beat open models.

Pineau said he is interested in more coordination, particularly in Cohere’s research in the north, finding ways to develop AI agents in a private, secure setting, and creating benchmarks to evaluate these systems. Pineau also said he was interested in exploring how networks of AI agents interact in the real world.

One of Pineau’s immediate challenges is replacing Sara Hooker, VP of AI Research at Cohere. He announced her departure this week after helping to build the company’s research program. Given the surge in demand for AI talent, hiring AI researchers with Hooker’s caliber may be difficult in the current market.

However, Pineau sees this as an opportunity to “bring a lot of talent.” However, she emphasized that Cohere has a solid foundation for AI researchers and it’s important that it’s not just for everyone to bring in.

“Hiring a bunch of superstars doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a superstar team,” Pineau said. “It’s really about how people work together.”

Of course, Meta’s AI units look very different compared to when Pineau was in a few months ago. Over the summer, Mark Zuckerberg has hired and reportedly offers the best reward package for Northern AI researchers of $100 million to join MSL. This has led Openai to also raise compensation for STAR employees, making it extremely difficult for small players to land top AI researchers.

As Meta, Openai and humanity are throwing billions of dollars in AI efforts, Cohere is trying to do more with less. For Pineau, that means making a calculated research bet. This is the kind that quickly becomes an attractive product and keeps the company in racing.

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