Aidan N. Gomez

Aidan Gomez is a British-Canadian computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, with a focus on natural language processing. He is the co-founder and CEO of the technology company Cohere.

Early life and education Gomez grew up in Brighton, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics. He was pursuing a PhD in computer science from the University of Oxford. He paused his studies to launch Cohere. He was granted the PhD in 2024.

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 changing the AI industry and helping lead to the creation of ChatGPT. The paper proposed a novel deep learning architecture called the transformer, that enables machine learning models to analyze large amounts of data for patterns, and then use those patterns to make predictions while leveraging GPU parallelization. It has been commonly adopted for training large language models and in the development of generative AI.

As a PhD student, Gomez worked as a machine learning researcher at Google Brain. As of Sept 2025, Cohere has raised about US$1.6 billion at valuation north of $7 billion, as Gomez leads the company as its CEO. In April 2026, Cohere acquired Aleph Alpha, a German AI company, creating a combined company with a $20 billion valuation.

Gomez was named to the 2023 Time 100/AI list of the most influential people in the field of artificial intelligence.

In April 2025, Gomez was elected to the board of Rivian.

Views on AI Gomez has stated that warnings regarding the existential risk from artificial intelligence are overblown, and that real risks involve the automated spread of misinformation on social media. He said that the United States would win the AI arms race over China.