Aidan Gomez is a British-Canadian computer scientist working in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science, with a focus on natural language processing.[2,1,23] Born in 1997 (age 20), he is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He completed his education at the University of Toronto, earning a BS, and at the University of Oxford, where he earned a PhD. Gomez has worked with Google Brain and is the co-founder and CEO of the technology company Cohere.[3,4] His official website is aidangomez.ca.
Early life and education
Gomez grew up in Brighton, Ontario.[5] He graduated from the University of Toronto, earning a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics.[6] He went on to pursue a doctorate in computer science at the University of Oxford, but paused his studies to found the company Cohere.[7,8] He was ultimately awarded his PhD in 2024.[8]
Career
In 2017, as a 20-year-old intern at Google Brain, Gomez was one of eight authors of the research paper "Attention Is All You Need", which is credited with transforming the artificial intelligence industry and helping create ChatGPT.[9,10,21,3,4,11] The paper proposed a novel deep learning architecture called the Transformer, which enables machine learning models to analyze large amounts of data for patterns and then use those patterns to make predictions while leveraging GPU parallelization. Its adoption became widespread for training large language models and developing generative artificial intelligence.[3,12] 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.[12,13,14,22]
As a PhD student, Gomez worked as a machine learning researcher at Google Brain, where he co-authored the paper "One Model to Learn Them All" on multi-task learning using a single neural network.[7,6,13] In 2019, Gomez left Google Brain to found Cohere, an enterprise-focused company that helps businesses apply artificial intelligence in chatbots, search engines, and other products.[3,4,22,14] He serves as the CEO of the company, which was valued at $5.5 billion in July 2024 and had raised approximately $1.6 billion at a valuation exceeding $7 billion as of September 2025.[15,14,4]
Gomez was included in the 2023 Time 100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.[3] He and his Cohere co-founders Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst were ranked first on the 2023 "AI Trailblazers Power List" published by Maclean's magazine.[11] In April 2025, Gomez was elected to the board of directors of Rivian.[16,17,15]
Views on AI
Gomez stated that warnings regarding the existential risk from artificial intelligence are exaggerated, and that the real risks involve the automated spread of misinformation on social media.[18,19,17] He also stated that the United States will win the AI arms race against China, outpacing it.[20,19]
