As open-source AI becomes concentrated in China, Cohere says it wants to provide a secure alternative.
Canadian AI firm Cohere has unveiled a new AI model that’s available to developers to use or modify as needed, for free.
The news: On Wednesday, the enterprise-focused AI startup released its latest large language model: Command A+. The mixture-of-experts model, which splits up processing between sub-models or “experts,” is twice as fast as Cohere’s previous models and has lower latency and higher accuracy, the company says. It’s also available as open source, meaning that developers can directly access the weights used to build and operate the model. Cohere has also made implementation guides available. Nvidia applauded the launch, which was made possible by its GPUs.
From the source: “This tech can go one of two ways,” Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst wrote in a post to X on Wednesday. “It can go the way the internet and mobile phones did—in which technological hegemony resulted in a mostly disempowering tech. Or it can empower the people that use it. We are working towards that second one.” Empowerment will only happen, Frosst added in a video, if tech is “owned by people … and that only happens if things are open-sourced.”
Following the thread: The world’s most popular open-source AI models, Qwen and DeepSeek, were both created in China. In contrast, US-based Anthropic hasn’t open-sourced any of its flagship models, and OpenAI has only released a handful as open-source over the years. Making a product free means greater adoption; 41 percent of AI models downloaded last year were built in China. In a release, Cohere stated it hopes this model will provide an alternative, open solution that helps enterprises with “transparency, security, vendor dependence, and long-term sovereignty.”
Final thought: With recent acquisitions in Germany, Cohere is positioning itself as a leading AI solution for companies and governments looking outside of the US and China. With this release, it appears to be positioning itself as a more transparent and accessible alternative, too.
Feature image courtesy the Vector Institute. Photo by Evelyn Bray Photography.