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Cohere has announced the release of updated versions of its application programming interfaces (APIs) for its AI models Chat, Embed, Rerank, and Classify.
Collectively, the new API updates are known as API V2, and Cohere is being transparent about the fact that the updates are meant to more closely align with AI industry standards to make it easier for developers to switch their applications over to be powered by Cohere’s models in lieu of the competition: namely, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and Meta.
Earlier this month, Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) general partner Martin Casado posted on X an image of a graph showing the results of a survey from AI API platform Kong of 800 enterprise leaders revealing the large language models (LLMs) they were using.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT dominated the chart with 27% market share compared to 18% using Microsoft’s Azure AI cloud service and 17% for Google Gemini. Cohere was second-to-last with a distant 5%, showing how the Toronto-based startup — co-founded by some of the former Google researchers behind the original 2017 Transformer paper that ushered in the generative AI era — has a lot of ground to make up to win over the enterprise customers it’s courting.
Survey results of nearly 800 enterprise folks on LLM market share (run by Kong). Most notable to me is the dramatic gain in Gemini use. Amazing job by the Alphabet team. pic.twitter.com/5EZx8IBBUT— martin_casado (@martin_casado) September 14, 2024
Enhanced reliability with more precise settings
One of the most significant changes in the V2 API release is the requirement for developers to specify the model version in their API calls.
Previously, this field was optional, which sometimes led to unexpected behavior when new models were released and the default model changed.
By making the model version a mandatory field, Cohere ensures that developers maintain consistent application performance, particularly in scenarios involving Embed models, where using differen …