Cohere raises billions, with up to $1.6B from Ottawa, and faces criticism
Follow-up to Wednesday Oct 28: Did Qwen really try to phone home? The claim is now disputedLast time, we saw the Qwen 'phone home' claim become disputed. That claim came from Cohere, the Canadian AI company, about Alibaba's open model Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Now there is a money angle.
A popular post on r/LocalLLaMA says Cohere announced a Series E funding round of several billion dollars. It says the round includes up to $1.6 billion from the Canadian government. The same post calls Cohere's Qwen experiment "largely unscientific". It says Cohere used heavy prompt tricks and pre-filling to push the model into writing partial web commands.
This is one user's view, and the post title itself says "arguably" unethical. But the timing, a scary claim about a Chinese model just days before a big raise, is getting attention.
This is Canadian public money in AI, so Canadians should follow it closely. Safety claims need to be solid and checked, especially when they make headlines just before a funding round.
