COHERE hires the Longtime Meta-Recherche Research Manager Joelle Pineau as chief AI chief

Investors have seen the Canadian startup of the AI once seen as a promising competitor to challenge Openai and Anthropic in the race for the construction of border AI models, with its donors pouring around $ 1 billion behind the CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-wrote a founding document in LLMS when he was a google intern.

But the COHERE AI models have been late on the cutting edge of technology, and its activities have not changed as its competitors.

Now, the company brings a leader in veteran research to reorganize its AI efforts: Cohere hired Joelle Pineau, the former Vice-President of Meta AI which previously supervised the Fundamental Laboratory for Research on AI (Fair) of the technology giant. In his role as a newly created chief officer, Pineau will supervise the AI strategy in the cohere research, products and policies.

A Canadian AI scientist and Professor McGill, Pineau, helped guide the early development of the open models of Meta Llama Ai alongside Yann Lecun, a pioneer in neural networks. Pigal Left meta In May after almost eight years with the company.

For COHERE, it’s a big hiring, and he pinpoints his hopes on the veteran helps him more research, improving his research and product pipeline and recruiting the best talents.

The rental arrives at a pivotal time for cohere: the company has just raised $ 500 million in a Evaluation of $ 6.8 billion – An impressive sum was the startup which does not compete with Openai, Google, Meta and Anthropic, whose war chests are worth tens of billions each.

But while its rivals are trying to develop AI systems which can correspond (or exceed) human performance on a wide variety of tasks, cohere has a narrower concentration. The startup mainly builds AI applications that can solve practical problems for businesses and government agencies, emphasizing privacy and security.

In an interview with Techcrunch, Pineau said that Cohere focuses on real world business applications is something that entered it. “Many players are very singularly focused on AGA, superintelligence, etc.”, said Pineau, alluding to companies like his former employer, Meta, who recently invested billions in his new meta-supentingence unit (MSL). “They did not necessarily understand what this AI will be used.”

She underlined the Openai Launch of GPT-5 Last week, what many felt was disappointing, because the proof that the calendar to reach act can be “a little longer than we thought”. In the meantime, Pineau says that there is a lot of room so that more practical AI models allow productivity in different industries.

Originally from Canada, Pineau said that she had her eye on Cohere since they were founded in 2019 and that she was delighted to contribute to a company whose founders are based in her country of origin.

Beyond patriotism, Pineau thinks that the opportunity with Cohere is a good chance to venture beyond research. In Fair, Pineau supervised research teams working on projects that could take 18 months to 10 years to deliver. Now she will work in a much tighter chronology, as well as to get involved with customers and products. And even if Cohere has fewer resources than Meta, Pineau said she would be more agile in her new role.

The latest cohere product is an AI agent Platform nicknamed North that companies and government agencies can deploy privately on their own infrastructure, an attractive concept for many of its customers, who are banks and federal organizations that manage very sensitive data. This puts cohere in competition with open source suppliers like Deepseek and Meta, whose models can also be executed locally, but at a lower cost. Cohere bets by offering more support around his private deployments, he can beat open models.

Pineau said that she was particularly interested in creating more cohere research around the North, finding ways to develop AI agents in private and secure contexts and create references to assess these systems. Pineau also said that she wanted to explore how AI agent networks interact with each other in the real world.

An immediate challenge for Pineau will be to replace the vice-president of research on Cohere AI, Sara Hooker, who announced it departure This week, after several years to help build the company’s research program. The hiring of an AI researcher of the caliber of Hooker can be difficult on the current market given the demand for talent from arrow.

But Pineau considers this as an opportunity to “bring in a lot of talents”, noting that when she left Meta, several of her former colleagues suggested that they would follow her in a new AI laboratory. However, she pointed out that Cohere has a solid base of AI researchers and that it is important not only to call on anyone.

“Hiring a bunch of superstars does not necessarily make a superstar team,” said Pineau. “This is really the way people work together.”

Of course, the AI units of Meta are very different today from those when Pineau was there a few months ago. During the summer, Mark Zuckerberg went to a Recruit spreewould offer some of the best compensation packages for industry AI researchers north of $ 100 million to reach MSL. This has prompted Openai to also increase the remuneration of its star employees, which makes it quite difficult for small players to land the best IA researchers.

While Meta, Openai and Anthropic throw billions of dollars at their AI efforts, Cohere tries to do more with less. For Pineau, this will mean manufacturing calculated research betting – the type that can quickly turn into convincing products and keep the business in the race.

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