Aidan Gomez

Overview

Aidan Gomez is a Canadian computer scientist, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cohere^[1][3]. He is one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture^[1][2]. Because that architecture became the common foundation for later large language models, his name tends to appear alongside the small group of researchers who wrote it.

Gomez was born in 1996 or 1997 in Toronto, Ontario, and grew up in Brighton, Ontario^[1].

Education and early research

He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics at the University of Toronto^[1]. He then went to the University of Oxford for a doctorate, which he completed in 2024, after pausing his studies to launch Cohere^[1].

His research career started unusually early. In 2017, as a 20-year-old intern at Google Brain, he became one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need"^[1][2]. The paper put forward the Transformer, a neural network architecture built around attention: rather than passing information step by step along a sequence, the model learns to weigh how much each part of its input matters to every other part. That design made it far more practical to train very large models on very large amounts of text, and it was widely adopted afterwards.

Gomez later worked as a machine-learning researcher at Google Brain while he was a PhD student, and co-authored "One Model to Learn Them All"^[1]. The title points at a recurring idea in the field: instead of building a separate model for every kind of data or task, train one model that handles many of them.

Building research communities

In 2017 Gomez founded FOR.ai, a collaborative machine-learning research programme^[1]. It later became Cohere For AI and is now called Cohere Labs^[1]. The programme's path reflects a broader shift in how machine-learning research is organised: open collaborations among students and researchers, supported by a company, sitting alongside the work done inside universities and large industrial labs.

Cohere

Gomez left Google Brain in 2019 to co-found Cohere with Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, and he serves as its CEO^[1][3]. Cohere has said that Gomez and its chief technology officer Phil Blunsom are both based in the United Kingdom, where the company opened a London office^[4].

Recognition

In 2023 he was named to the TIME100 AI list, and he and his co-founders were ranked first on Maclean's 2023 AI Trailblazers Power List^[1]. In April 2025 he was elected to the board of the electric-vehicle maker Rivian^[1].

Why he matters

Gomez's career sits at the point where a research result turns into an industry. The Transformer paper he co-wrote as an intern described an architecture that others could build on, and much of the subsequent progress in language models rests on that design. His later work has two sides: writing research, such as the multi-task paper he co-authored at Google Brain, and building organisations — a collaborative research programme that grew into Cohere Labs, and a company he has led as CEO since founding it^[1][3][4]. A seat on the board of an electric-vehicle manufacturer shows the same expertise being drawn into industries outside software^[1]. For readers trying to follow how modern AI developed, his trajectory is a compact record of it: a graduate internship, a widely used architecture, a research community, and then a company built around the same technology.