Aidan Gomez
Aidan Gomez (born 1995) is a British-Canadian computer scientist celebrated as the youngest co-author of the paper that quietly rewired modern computing, and later as the founder who bet an entire company on taking that invention to businesses. Gomez grew up in Brighton, a small town on the north shore of Lake Ontario, population 12,000. He studied Computer Science and mathematics at the University of Toronto before beginning doctoral work at the University of Oxford, where he was a doctoral student of Yarin Gal and Yee Whye Teh, eventually being granted the PhD in 2024.
His name entered the history books in 2017, when, as a 20 year-old intern at Google Brain, Gomez was one of eight authors of the research paper "Attention Is All You Need", which is credited with changing the AI industry and helping lead to the creation of ChatGPT. Working alongside Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, and others, he helped introduce the Transformer, an architecture built on Self-attention rather than Recurrence or Convolutions, enabling the parallelizable, scalable systems behind BERT, GPT, GPT-3, and the Vision Transformer. The paper — a cornerstone of any AI and LLM Papers Reading Map — descends intellectually from earlier breakthroughs in Sequence to Sequence Learning, Neural Machine Translation, Long Short-Term Memory, and Word Embedding techniques like Word2Vec.
Rather than remain purely academic, Gomez pivoted toward industry. Gomez, who was a computer science student at the University of Toronto at the time of his internship, left Google in 2021 to co-found Cohere alongside Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, targeting enterprise deployment of Large Language Model technology rather than consumer chatbots. Under his leadership as CEO, Cohere grew rapidly; as of Sept 2025, Cohere has raised about US$1.6 billion at valuation north of $7 billion. Gomez has been outspoken that existential AI panic is a distraction, arguing instead for grounded, responsible deployment.