Dr. Sarah Hooker
Cohere For AI
Head of Cohere For AI and former research scientist at Google Brain. Author of the influential essay 'The Hardware Lottery', examining how computer hardware availability dictates which machine learning ideas succeed. Leader of the open-science Aya project, creating high-performance multilingual models for 101 languages.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
The Hardware Lottery: Algorithmic Stagnation and Hardware Alignment
Authored the CACM article formalizing the 'hardware lottery', demonstrating how deep learning architectures win not on fundamental superiority but on whether they fit contemporary GPU and accelerator architectures.
Qualitative and historical systems critique; guiding architectural paradigms rather than releasing a standalone model.
Context: Historical analysis of neural networks, specialized ASICs, and modern transformer tensor architectures.
View missionAya: An Open Multilingual Foundation Model and Evaluation Dataset for 101 Languages
Directed the global Aya research collaboration involving 3,000+ researchers across 119 countries to produce instruction datasets and state-of-the-art open-weights multilingual foundation models for underrepresented languages.
Extremely low-resource languages with minimal digital footprint require specialized human annotation to avoid hallucination.
Context: Cohere Command base weights, 101 languages, 513M human-curated multilingual instruction tokens.
View mission