TORONTO — Cohere has recruited former Meta AI research head Joelle Pineau amid red-hot competition between tech firms for the field’s top scientists.

The Montreal-based computer scientist will take the new role of chief AI officer at Cohere, leading the startup’s research to advance the capabilities of its technology and advising on new products built around it. She left Meta in May, having most recently led the social media giant’s network of Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) labs, which helped develop the first generation of its Llama large language models.

Pineau said she had other offers, but chose Cohere because of its focus on “actually interesting” business applications of the technology, and on developing and deploying it in responsible ways. It’s also one of the few companies with the resources and talent to train and launch large-scale AI models. “There’s a lot more that can be done to keep on growing this innovation pipeline,” she said.

Pineau’s departure from Meta came as CEO Mark Zuckerberg was launching a personal effort to hire top AI researchers for a new team pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the theoretical state in which a system meets and then surpasses human smarts.

The firm has since committed hundreds of millions of dollars to hire top researchers away from rivals like OpenAI, Google and Apple. In turn, those firms—and other model-makers like Microsoft, Anthropic, and Mistral—are trying to keep their stars while poaching from each other.

Pineau said she’s not worried that Cohere is losing out in the AI talent wars. “You don’t land a world-class research project by just putting in a collection of stars,” she said. “You need to have a solid team.” While Cohere has fewer people and less money than some of its AI rivals—on Thursday it also announced it had raised US$500 million in new financing at a US$6.8-billion valuation; OpenAI is reportedly worth US$300 billion—Pineau expressed confidence in the quality of its existing staff and ability to keep attracting talent. 

“Cohere is grounded by a deeply technical team, building state-of-the-art models at the frontier,” said Jordan Jacobs, managing partner at Radical Ventures, which co-led the new round. The startup has shown it can “attract and retain the best,” he said, citing the Pineau hire.

In contrast to Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley AI leaders, Cohere’s co-founders have repeatedly emphasized that they’re not chasing AGI. Pineau said the problems that researchers must solve to advance the frontier of AI—like how to scale models, use reinforcement learning techniques to train them, or make them work in different languages and media beyond the written word—are similar whether or not a firm is trying to create superintelligence. “You want to build models that have the capability to accomplish productive, efficient work,” she said. “That’s what we’re here to do.” 

Cohere has instead focused on building smaller models for companies in highly regulated sectors, touting the privacy and security of its technology and the ability to deploy it on clients’ own hardware. Pineau said she sees “a lot more growth potential” in business applications of AI than the consumer uses she worked on at Meta. She cited challenges like ensuring enterprise applications work well for individual clients and keep their data confidential, while still ensuring Cohere can train better models for all its customers. 

Last week, Cohere made its flagship product widely available, a system called North used for building AI agents. The firm has already sold customized versions of the product to a handful of large clients like RBC, Bell and Saudi Arabian telecom company STC Group. Cohere has picked sectors “where AI has a chance of having a huge influence in terms of productivity,” Pineau said, and the research team will use feedback from the early installations to improve the firm’s models.

She will also oversee Cohere Labs, a non-profit arm that works on fundamental scientific problems in AI, collaborating with researchers outside the firm and open-sourcing much of its work. On Monday, current Cohere Labs head Sara Hooker announced she would leave the firm next month.

Pineau will continue to work from Montreal. Cohere announced last month it was opening an office in the city, and inked a new collaboration deal with Mila, the high-profile Montreal AI institute of which Pineau is an academic member.

She joined Meta in September 2017 to lead a new FAIR lab in Montreal. It’s one of a number of U.S. tech firms with research hubs in the city, including Google, Microsoft and ServiceNow. Some Canadian scale-up founders have complained that the foreign-owned labs drain talent and innovations away from the country. 

Cohere, by contrast, is Canada’s main contender in the LLM race. Working for a homegrown firm was also part of the appeal for Pineau. “We need to grow a number of companies in Canada that are having an impact on the world stage,” she said.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with details of Cohere’s fundraising and comments from Radical Ventures managing partner Jordan Jacobs.