The California-based hardware giant created the fund to “expand and develop secure, reliable and trustworthy AI solutions,” it said in a release Tuesday. Cisco has already committed US$200 million under the fund to Toronto’s Cohere, Paris’s Mistral AI and Montreal’s Scale AI. (The Logic) 

Talking point: Cisco is the latest major tech company looking to gain a foothold in the rapidly growing generative-AI sector through a dedicated investment fund. Salesforce last year doubled the size of its AI fund to US$500 million, a strategy that mirrors IBM’s US$500-million Enterprise AI Venture Fund or the US$50-million Dropbox Ventures. Amazon Web Services launched a generative AI startup accelerator last year. Also on Tuesday, Reuters reported that Nvidia and Salesforce, both previous Cohere investors, led a US$450-million investment into the Toronto company, with Cisco backing it for the first time. Cohere develops large language models that interpret reams of data and generate text-based responses that sound human.