Joelle Pineau

Chief AI Officer, @cohere
Professor of Computer Science, @mcgillu
Core academic member, @Mila_Quebec
Ex-Meta (FAIR team)

[Cohere Labs @Cohere_Labs]

Today we’re releasing the Agentic Task Ecosystem (ATE) dataset: nearly 700K tools from public MCP servers offering a new window into what developers are building AI agents to do.

Our analysis of this ecosystem reveals early patterns in how AI will impact the future of work. This won’t merely depend on AI capabilities, but also on which tasks developers choose to automate and how.

Read the blog and explore the dataset: https://t.co/A66XKBNNnv

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

https://t.co/B8DEPkgY7X

[Ross Taylor @rosstaylor90]

A few words on the Sovereign AI debate, having built several LLMs in Meta while in the UK and now working as a UK based startup:

1. Lots of people are trying to do the right thing to make the UK a better place to start AI companies. Time lags until the benefit show, but you should judge on the intent now. I support the direction of travel!

2. DeepMind has been enormously beneficial for the UK, but it has muddied the waters for a sovereign LLM company to emerge as (until recently) the Government continued to celebrate it as a British achievement / push it as a national champion.

3. Similarly, people are now celebrating recent US investment in King’s Cross, while also wanting more UK sovereignty. Clearly some income effects here, but I would worry about the substitution effects too. AI is not like other types of foreign investment.

4. The relevant talent nexuses in UK that could develop a competitive foundation model are from GDM and old Meta AI GenAI. Also some folks from smaller groups, ex Conjecture, Stability. The talent is still there, although a lot was snapped up by US FM companies in the past year. I personally think it’s not too difficult to develop new talent either from UK universities, but you probably need an ex GDM or Meta core (Gemini or Llama). Or if not: show evidence first (technical reports) before claiming you can do it.

5. Building an LLM is very different from doing regular AI research - skillset is different. Former is closer to engineering; long hours, often unsexy work. Important to distinguish between these two types of talent in the UK ecosystem; arguably too much focus on the latter / ideas guys.

6. On research - DeepSeek R1 post-train cost $300k . Yes, they also needed an ablation budget and to train a base model, invest in infra and talent - and yes the cost of an R1 moment is increasing year on year - but the idea that you need $1bn plus immediately to show results is complete FUD. You need billions to scale, not to validate new directions.

7. In my experience, every failed LLM effort (from model results perspective) I witnessed in the past came from a combination of poor leadership, politics, unclear vision, and premature scaling. Good efforts usually started from small teams who had worked with each other for a long time, had shared thesis, and scaled progressively in bite-sized pieces. Some recent lessons here for neolabs as well.

8. Things take time. Eg we’ve spent ~12 months mostly on internal infra just to get into the position to be able to make big swings. It’s important to nurture new companies through the initial phase. Expectation management is also crucial. I think expecting new UK companies to have single big bang releases is very dangerous; sort of like overwatering a plant. The correct release pattern is “decent”. “decent”, “decent”, “quite good actually”, “holy shit”.

9. Please don’t allow politicians or journalists to kill recent or upcoming AI investment efforts. We will need way more - at the price of potential inefficiency in places - as AI is existential for the country. Ambitious projects are usually incredibly fragile in the early stages; look after them!

10. Mythos is a good triggering moment, but what’s coming will make it look like a toy, so it’s worth building for what’s coming in 5 years time - not a current generation model.

Very proud to be building in the UK - more to share on that soon - alongside many other great early stage AI companies! 🇬🇧

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Such an honour to now be a graduate of the University of Ottawa!

[Université d'Ottawa | University of Ottawa @uOttawa]

The University of Ottawa is honoured to award an honorary doctorate to Dr. Joëlle Pineau (@jpineau1), a world-renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert.

For more: https://t.co/hIxKztyKAN

@uOttawaGenie @cohere

#uOttawa #uOGrad26

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Very impressive work by @alexrives and the CZI team on building a world model of protein biology. I’m especially thrilled to see the models and data are fully open-sourced. These contributions pave the way towards a better understanding of human physiology, and plenty of new health-care discoveries. Exciting times!

[Alex Rives @alexrives]

Today we're announcing ESMFold2, an open scientific engine to power prediction, design, and discovery across protein biology.

The new model delivers state of the art performance on protein interactions, especially antibodies, a critical modality for therapeutics.

We have designed and validated miniprotein binders and single chain antibodies across five therapeutic targets that are important in cancer and immunology. We are seeing very high success rates, and affinities at levels consistent with therapeutic activity.

We’re also releasing an atlas of 6.8 billion proteins, and 1.1 billion predicted structures.

ESMFold2 is built on a state of the art language model that has been trained on billions of protein sequences.

A world model of protein biology emerges through language modeling.

We’ve used the techniques of mechanistic interpretability developed to understand large language models to understand the concepts ESM uses to represent proteins.

The model’s representation space has a compositional organization of features across scales, levels of complexity, and abstraction, that reflects and mirrors the understanding of protein biology developed through a century of empirical science.

This understanding emerges without prior knowledge, just from language modeling of protein sequences.

Language models are becoming a powerful substrate to understand and program biology.

The design of protein interactions is one of the most fundamental problems in biophysics, and has critical implications for the discovery of new medicines. A simple gradient based search with the model was able to discover high-affinity protein binders.

I'm excited by the potential this has to accelerate basic science and the understanding of proteins. And especially for the new avenues it opens up for therapeutic design and medicine.

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

@nicogontier @cohere @tscholak @reliant_ai Welcome to @cohere! Great to be working with you again!

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Check out our latest open-source model, built for efficiency, with a focus on business use-cases, available for all.

[Cohere @cohere]

Introducing: Cohere Command A+

We’ve created our most powerful LLM yet, optimized it to run on as little hardware as possible, and released it open-source for all.

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Exciting news for the future of AI!
@cohere and Aleph Alpha are partnering to build a global sovereign AI platform. As demand for AI grows, we are accelerating the development of next-generation frontier models while upholding strong standards for data security and ethical AI.

[Cohere @cohere]

🚀 Sovereign AI for the world.

Cohere & Aleph Alpha form transatlantic AI powerhouse anchored in Canada & Germany! Combining our global scale with European R&D excellence to build sovereign, enterprise-grade AI. Security, privacy & trust for businesses & governments worldwide. #SovereignAI #AIPartnership

Learn more: https://t.co/hSwFQfuTAd

Image from left to right: Rolf Schumann, Schwarz Digits, Samuel Weinbach, Aleph Alpha, Aidan Gomez, Cohere, Minister Solomon, Canada, Minister Wildberger, Germany

[Cohere @cohere]

We're proud to be on the @Forbes AI 50 list again! It reflects our focus on building secure, sovereign AI that helps enterprises and governments put their data to work on their terms.

Learn more: https://t.co/A1fO54Rjbw

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Cohere vise une croissance à long terme et la protection des données et de la propriété intellectuelle canadiennes. En grandissant, on veut exporter les valeurs canadiennes partout à travers le monde et conclure des partenariats pour bâtir une IA souveraine et sécuritaire.🇨🇦🌍

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Merci encore pour l'opportunité de témoigner hier, @RaquelDancho. Je veux être claire : le Canada, c'est chez nous et notre siège social va toujours y rester. Comme je l'ai dit, je suis allée chez Cohere pour renforcer le leadership canadien en IA, et ça ne va pas changer.

[Raquel Dancho @RaquelDancho]

Cohere, a Canadian AI company, received $240M in taxpayer funding.

Much of it reportedly went to a data centre built and operated by a U.S. firm.

Now, Cohere is reportedly in talks to merge with a German company.

I asked if they’re committed to remaining Canadian-controlled. Their response was not definitive.

Did the Liberals include sovereignty guarantees in the $240M contract?

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Cohere is committed to long-term growth and protecting Canadian data and IP. As we scale, we want to export the values that make Canada so great to the rest of the world and build partnerships that deliver sovereign and secure AI. 🇨🇦🌍

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Thank you again for the opportunity to testify yesterday, @raqueldancho. I want to be unambiguously clear: Canada is our home and we will always remain headquartered here. As I shared in my testimony, I joined Cohere to help advance Canadian AI leadership, and that won't change.

[Raquel Dancho @RaquelDancho]

Cohere, a Canadian AI company, received $240M in taxpayer funding.

Much of it reportedly went to a data centre built and operated by a U.S. firm.

Now, Cohere is reportedly in talks to merge with a German company.

I asked if they’re committed to remaining Canadian-controlled. Their response was not definitive.

Did the Liberals include sovereignty guarantees in the $240M contract?

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

@sivareddyg Congratulations!

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Tiny Aya models are here!
Efficient enough to run locally, while delivering state-of-the-art translation quality and broad language coverage over 70 global languages. Including base models, specialized variants, and a detailed tech report.

[Cohere Labs @Cohere_Labs]

Introducing ✨Tiny Aya✨, a family of massively multilingual small language models built to run where people actually are.

Tiny Aya delivers strong multilingual performance in 70+ global languages in a 3.35B parameter model, efficient enough to run locally, even on a phone.

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Fine-tuning my message on open-source AI, and its multiplicative effect.

[Chandra Sekhar Bondugula, MD., MHI @DrCSBondugula]

"Open source isn't just free beer; it’s the free recipe."

At the #IndiaAISummit2026, I heard some excellent insights from Mark Surman, President of the Mozilla Foundation, and Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere, during the session Operationalising Open Source AI: Pathways to Sovereignty.

A powerful analogy shared by Joelle really stayed with me:

There’s a difference between “free beer” and the “free beer recipe.”

Free beer: You can consume it — once it’s gone, you’re dependent on the next provider.

The recipe: It creates a multiplicative effect — the ability to innovate, adapt, localize, and build lasting capability.
That distinction matters enormously in AI.

As Mark emphasized, open source creates opportunity through transparency — the ability to study, modify, and audit systems. It gives organizations a head start. And when you have the recipe, you can build faster, more affordably, and more independently.

This “multiplicative effect” of open source is exactly why we are building our medical education apps on open frameworks. In healthcare AI, openness isn’t optional — it’s foundational for trust, transparency, and sovereignty.

We’re building the recipes for the future of medicine.
If you’re on the same mission, let’s connect.

#OpenSourceAI #AIInfrastructure #HealthcareAI

@jpineau1 @nixxin @medianama @cohere @mozilla @OfficialINDIAai @IndiaAiExpo @NVIDIAAI

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

Inspiring to witness the incredible engagement from Canadians across so many sectors—citizens, businesses, governments, NGOs—in shaping our AI future!
Serving on the Task Force has been a privilege, and I’m eager to see what will be Canada’s comprehensive AI strategy.

[ISED @ISED_CA]

(1/2) More than 11,000 Canadians and the 28 members of the AI Strategy Task Force shared ideas to help shape Canada’s AI strategy. Curious about the results? The engagement report is now available!

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

One step forward to enable those who value sovereign AI.

[Cohere @cohere]

Today we’re launching Model Vault — a dedicated, fully managed platform to run Cohere models securely and at scale.

Model Vault delivers the control and isolation of self-hosting, without the operational burden:

🔒 Dedicated, isolated VPC
⚡ No noisy neighbors or rate limits
🔁 Elastic inference with predictable performance
📈 Real-time usage and performance monitoring

No sharing. No limits. No surprises.

Let Model Vault take care of model scaling and serving — so you can focus on building.

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

@Ahmad_Al_Dahle Congratulations Ahmad on the new role! Can’t wait to see what you will accomplish with the Airbnb team - they are lucky to have you!

[Joelle Pineau @joellepineau]

@doomie Thanks Dumi! Much appreciated.