Alphabet Inc.’s Google is in talks to invest at least $200 million in artificial intelligence startup Cohair Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, another part of a growing arms race between the sector’s big technology companies. signal.
Founded in 2019, Cohair makes natural language processing software that developers can use to build artificial intelligence applications for businesses, including tools and other features for chatbots that can understand human speech and text. Last November, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Google to supply the computing power needed for Cohair to train its software models.
As part of the conversation, Kohare held discussions with chipmaker Nvidia Corp about a potential strategic investment, the people said. Some said that talks between the companies are still going on and may break down.
Coher’s evaluation could not be learned from any potential new funding.
Google and Nvidia declined to comment. Cohare, based in Toronto, did not respond to requests for comment.
Other tech giants are also looking to bet more on artificial intelligence. Microsoft Corp. is in advanced talks for a new funding round at OpenAI, another startup that is racing to build software models to achieve artificial general intelligence, or the ability for a machine to understand anything that a human can do, within years.
OpenAI already uses Microsoft’s cloud service Azure as its exclusive partner and has agreed to prioritize Microsoft when bringing technologies to market. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has emphasized the importance of AI for the company since taking over the top role in 2015. Alphabet bought AI research company DeepMind in 2014. Google’s research division, Google Brain, is one of the most followed publishers by mass. Language models and other AI topics.
Cohair CEO Aidan Gomez was previously an intern at Google Brain, working on a paper that advanced the widely cited Transformer AI model.
Some researchers have cautioned that new AI models may raise thorny ethical questions and contribute to unfair publicity in the field.
The new funding will spark a flurry of investment activity for artificial intelligence startups, which have otherwise been a slow market for new deals. In February, Kohre raised $125 million in a new funding round led by investment firm Tiger Global Management, bringing its total funding to more than $170 million at the time.
On Monday, artificial intelligence firm Stability AI said it raised $101 million in new funding from investors including Coteau Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company held a launch party in San Francisco on the same day, in which Google co-founder Sergey Brin was present.