Ivan Zhang - Co-Founder and CTO of Cohere
Asian Tech Leaders
English - July 21, 2023 14:06 - 57 minutes - 53 MB - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsTechnology Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Ivan Zhang is the co-founder and CTO of Cohere, a leading GenAI startup that provides natural language processing models to help developers and companies build new products and unlock business value with language AI. Cohere’s models power interactive chat features, generate text for product descriptions, blog posts, and articles, and capture the meaning of text for search, content moderation, and intent recognition. Cohere recently closed a $270M series C round and is valued at over $2B.
Prior to co-founding Cohere in 2019,Ivan founded FOR.ai, an independent AI research group and worked in the biotech and MLOps space as a software engineer. Ivan dropped out of his undergrad University of Toronto and he is a proud Torontonian, Chinese immigrant, and League of Legends player.
In this episode, you will learn:
How Ivan first fell in love with computer science in high school
How Ivan made the mental calculation to drop out of university (and convince his parents it was a rational idea)
Where Ivan thinks we are in the GenAI hype cycle and why Cohere is here to stay
About Ivan’s favorite Chinese restaurants in Toronto
You can follow Ivan on Twitter and learn more about Cohere at www.cohere.com
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(00:01) Tech Trends and Personal Background
(16:55) High School, Computer Science, and Support
(27:26) University, Hackathons, and Career Path
(36:08) Founding a Startup and Building Technology
(47:03) Recruiting Strategies and Cohere's Vision
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Transcript: https://justinpang.com/ivan-podcast-transcript