This leader is making AI accessible across the world’s languages
Sara Hooker runs the nonprofit Cohere for AI.
Good morning! Poppi to be acquired by PepsiCo for almost $2 billion, Forever 21's U.S. operator files for bankruptcy, and Sara Hooker talks AI language accessibility.
- AI accessibility. Language is an incredibly powerful tool—but not all languages are represented equally in technology. Cohere for AI is tackling this disparity, focusing on making AI accessible to more languages. “I think people forget—we can build the best model in the world, but what matters is how people feel about it and whether it works for them,” Sara Hooker, head of Cohere for AI, tells Fortune’s Sharon Goldman. Their conversation is the second in a series of profiles of women in tech for Fortune.
Cohere for AI, the nonprofit research lab of $5.5 billion AI company Cohere, has been among the first to offer AI models for languages like Korean and Swahili. And through an initiative that the organization launched two years ago, 3,000 researchers from all around the world collaborated with Cohere for AI on multilingual AI research. “From the beginning, we doubled the number of languages that were covered by generative AI,” Hooker says. This accessibility is the company’s “North Star.”
Hooker’s interest in languages stems from her upbringing. She and her family moved around a lot—Mozambique, Eswatini, Kenya, and Liberia—and so she was exposed to a lot of languages. “There’s this really powerful idea that when you speak in the language of someone, you really connect with their heart, not their head,” she shares.
She didn’t always intend to work in AI, though: “I didn’t set out wanting to do artificial intelligence, but I had always wanted to work on interesting problems,” Hooker says. After roles at Udemy and Google Brain and after working with Geoffrey Hinton and Samy Bengio—big names in the AI space—she was asked by the Cohere cofounders to lead its new research lab.
“We chose a problem which was critically underserved, but now everyone else is scrambling to catch up,” says Hooker. Read Sharon’s full story here.
Nina Ajemian
nina.ajemian@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
