The Toronto-based AI company is not entertaining takeover offers, Aidan Gomez said at a Toronto Tech Week event on Tuesday. “Acquisition is failure—it’s ending this process of building,” he said. (The Logic)

Talking point: Gomez’s no-exit comments come as the AI sector is seeing a wave of consolidation. Over the last year, Amazon (Adept and Covariant) and Google (Character AI) have done multibillion-dollar deals to hire away the founders of startups building foundation models and license their technology, which powers generative tools. Fellow internet giant Meta is also on the hunt, reportedly trying to buy Canadian researcher Ilya Sutskever’s new firm, Safe Superintelligence. Gomez said Cohere turned down a “nine-figure offer” from a large U.S. firm in its early years, before businesses were buying large language models. Cohere has itself been an acquirer at a smaller scale, buying Vancouver’s Cognosys for its research tools. Gomez said the firm is “still growing super quickly.”