Cohere has unveiled its latest large language model (LLM), Command R+, which is engineered to enhance enterprise workflows and applications.
The company said the new model is its most advanced and scalable LLM yet. Building on the foundations of the earlier Command R model, Command R+ boosts performance for various enterprise tasks, including data categorization and workflow automation, the company said.
Although Cohere said in March that it would train and deploy its models on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) under its partnership with Oracle, it has chosen to make Command R+ available first on Microsoft Azure. The software is set to launch on OCI shortly, with plans to expand to more cloud platforms in the upcoming weeks, said Cohere spokesman Kyle Lastovica. It’s already available through Cohere’s own hosted API.
Command R+ enables businesses to integrate their proprietary data, supporting customized applications with improved accuracy through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which taps into external databases for more accurate responses and minimizes errors.
“RAG enables enterprises to let the model search over private databases and use that information to form more accurate and useful responses,” Lastovica said. “Unique to our Command R model family, the model’s outputs come with clear citations and enable surfacing additional context from the source materials that mitigate hallucination.”
Like its predecessor, Command R+ boasts a 128,000-token context window to process large documents, and functions in ten languages, including English, Spanish, and Chinese.
CEO Aidan Gomez also talked up the model’s workflow automation capabilities in a blog post about the launch of Command R+. It can be applied to business workflows from customer relationship management to order completion, combining multiple tools over multiple steps through the use of APIs and LangChain, and retrying in the event of tool failures.
Price premium
The new features come at a substantial price premium over the previous model. Cohere is charging six times as much per input token and 10 times as much per output token for API access to Command R+ compared to Command R. Command R+ costs $3 per million input tokens, or $15 per million output tokens.
The new model is part of a booming market for AI enterprise software. According to IDC, a technology research and advisory company, enterprise investment in generative AI services, software, and infrastructure is predicted to surge from $16 billion this year to $143 billion by 2027.
Over this four-year span, generative AI spending is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 73.3%. IDC noted this rate is over double the growth rate of overall AI investments and nearly 13 times the CAGR for global IT spending during the same timeframe.