Highlights:

  • LivePerson is a pioneer in conversational AI and chatbots. The agreement will see the two businesses combine their solutions to address issues such as AI bias and hallucinations – cases in which AI fabricates a response.
  • Cohere, situated in Toronto, stands out among AI startups because of its tight relationships with Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google LLC. Aidan Gomez, the company’s CEO, previously worked as a researcher at Google Brain and is one of the co-authors of a seminal 2017 academic paper that first detailed the concept of a transformer model.

Cohere Inc., a generative artificial intelligence startup seen as a primary challenger to ChatGPT inventor OpenAI LP, recently collaborated with LivePerson Inc. to enhance its large language models which will be valuable for enterprise use cases.

LivePerson is a pioneer in conversational AI and chatbots. The agreement will see the two businesses combine their solutions to address issues such as AI bias and hallucinations – cases in which AI fabricates a response. According to the organizations, the effort has the potential to have a significant impact, leading to more reliable and responsible AI that is safe to use in enterprise environments.

Cohere, situated in Toronto, is noticeable among other AI startups because of its close relationship with the parent company of Google LLC, Alphabet Inc. The company’s CEO, Aidan Gomez, has worked as a researcher at Google Brain in the past and is one of the co-authors of a landmark 2017 academic paper that first detailed the concept of a transformer model. Transformers are a neural network, which are now the foundation for several important AI application cases.

Under the terms of the agreement, LivePerson wants to modify Cohere’s LLMs so that organizations can use them safely to automate more business processes. LivePerson is seeking to evolve its conversational chatbots to determine the “next steps” to take in every discussion. Its models are already built utilizing several third-party LLMs. For example, the bot may respond to a user’s inquiry with further text or recommendations or conduct other actions, such as completing a payment.

If a conversational AI assistant is to act on its own initiative, it must be more dependable than present implementations of the technology. Knowing this, LivePerson stated that it would collaborate with Cohere to fine-tune its models so that all statements made are truthful and supported by facts.

Gomez highlighted to a famous media house that Cohere manages AI adaptations by combining reinforcement learning and supervised learning to stress what’s known as “AI explainability,” or the model’s ability to always explain its results.

Cohere uses “retrieval augmented generation” to accomplish this, which essentially includes requesting the model to cite its sources each time it remarks. As a result, according to Gomez, anytime the model answers a query, it will refer to the corpus of information on which it was trained. By allowing people to verify replies, this AI explainability aims to eliminate hallucinations, especially dangerous when models are used in enterprise applications.

According to Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller, partnerships like the one between Cohere and LivePerson are likely to become considerably more widespread. He added, “Large language model vendors are looking for fresh outlets, especially other companies that provide viable use cases for their technology. There is a need for differentiation with such partnerships and Cohere is approaching this with a higher level of AI explainability. If it works, a lot of enterprises will be seriously interested.”

LivePerson will test and develop Cohere’s LLMs internally within its systems before extending the integration to its customers’ deployments. Ultimately, businesses seek to help enterprises install the most advanced and accurate LLMs to boost consumer engagement and commercial outcomes.