Authors: Deborah Marie Sophia, Jubi Barb, and Crystal Hu
Dec 4 (Reuters) – The United States and Canada are in an “incredible position” to work with economies around the world adopting artificial intelligence, putting the countries ahead of China in the global race for artificial intelligence, Aidan Gomez, chief executive of Canadian tech startup Cohere, said on Thursday.
In an interview at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York, Gomez noted that China has launched extremely high-performance artificial intelligence models, narrowing the gap between some of the best closed-source large-scale language models such as OpenAI.
But “what really matters is who is the major service provider for this technology — not who gets it first, but who commercializes it at scale. The United States and Canada are in an incredible position to be global partners in adopting this technology,” Gomez said.
“I think we’re going to beat China.”
The artificial intelligence arms race between China and the United States has intensified this year after Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek surged in popularity in early January. Since then, Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba and Baidu have rushed to launch new models and upgraded their artificial intelligence products more frequently.
To advance the country’s ambitious goal of becoming an AI leader, America’s big tech and AI companies have invested billions of dollars in improving computing power and their AI infrastructure.
Gomez’s comments contrasted with recent comments by Jensen Huang, chief executive of artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia, who warned that China was “nanoseconds behind the United States in AI” and “will win the AI race.” China’s access to advanced artificial intelligence chips, especially those produced by Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, remains a flashpoint in its technology competition with the United States.
Liberal democracies are reluctant to use Chinese technology
Gomez added that liberal democracies around the world tend to be less willing to use Chinese technology as critical infrastructure for their economies: “If you were to choose a partner you could rely on to transform an entire economy, I think you would choose liberal democracies.”
Toronto-based Cohere builds enterprise-specific AI models.
“Adding $10 billion a year to improve your models doesn’t deliver a return on investment for the technology itself, which is proven… Over the last few years, we’ve seen a slowdown in model improvements because of all this scaling,” Gomez said.
The comments come as technology investors increasingly demand that companies such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google show better returns on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent combined on artificial intelligence.
