March Online Meetup: Ahmet Üstün from Cohere

Dear community,

We are very happy to announce our March online meetup!

This time we are hosting Ahmet Üstün -- amazing research scientist from Cohere! Ahmet has participated in various massive multilingual projects. This time, he will tell about the most recent release from Cohere -- Tiny Aya.

Title: How to make AI more accessible across the Globe?

Abstract:
Tiny Aya is designed with a simple goal: to make powerful AI systems accessible to people everywhere, not just those with access to large-scale compute or dominant languages. In this talk, I will present Tiny Aya, the newest member of the Aya model family, focusing on how we build efficient multilingual models. I will discuss the challenges of scaling AI across languages, particularly in low-resource settings, and how techniques in efficient training, multilingual data curation, and model design help address them.

Ahmet Üstün is a research scientist and technical lead at Cohere. His work spans a broad range of topics in AI, including reinforcement learning, agentic coding, and multilingual AI. He is one of the core developers of the Aya model family, including Aya 101 (the ACL 2024 Best Paper Award), Aya Expanse, Aya Vision, and Tiny Aya. He currently leads the Code Agents team at Cohere, focusing on developing autonomous coding systems and advanced AI agents.