Inside the Paper That Changed AI Forever - Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on 2025 Agents

The MAD Podcast: How AI Gets Built — with Matt Turck · Jun 5, 2025 · 1h 2m

What really happened inside Google Brain when the “Attention is All You Need” paper was born? In this episode, Aidan Gomez — one of the eight co-authors of the Transformers paper and now CEO of Cohere — reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how a cold email and a lucky administrative mistake landed him at the center of the AI revolution.

Aidan shares how a group of researchers, given total academic freedom, accidentally stumbled into one of the most important breakthroughs in AI history — and why the architecture they created still powers everything from ChatGPT to Google Search today.

We…