Cohere Launches Command A: An Efficient Enterprise AI Model

Cohere has released Command A, a new language model designed for business applications that delivers strong performance while requiring less computing power than comparable models. Developed to run on as few as two GPUs, Command A aims to make advanced AI capabilities more accessible for organizations looking to deploy models privately within their infrastructure.

What Is Command A?

Command A is a family of language models developed for enterprise use cases. According to Cohere, the model offers:

• Faster Generation: Command A can generate up to 156 tokens per second, which Cohere reports is 1.75 times faster than GPT-4o and 2.4 times faster than DeepSeek-V3.
• Reduced Hardware Requirements: The model runs on two A100 or H100 GPUs, making it suitable for private deployments.
• Language Support: It works across 23 languages, including Arabic and English.
• Context Length: Command A has a context window of 256,000 tokens, allowing it to process longer documents and conversations.
• Enterprise Features: The model includes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), citation capabilities, and tool integration.

The Enterprise AI Challenge

Organizations adopting AI often face challenges with existing models:

• Large models typically require significant computing resources, increasing costs and latency
• Some models struggle with tasks involving complex reasoning or consistent outputs in business contexts

Cohere developed Command A to address these issues, focusing on creating a model that balances performance and efficiency. This approach aims to enable more organizations to deploy AI models privately within their own infrastructure.

Key Features

Performance

• In Cohere's evaluations, Command A performs comparably to larger models on business, STEM, and coding tasks
• The model handles instructions for tasks like SQL generation and tool-based operations

Efficiency

• Command A operates on two GPUs while maintaining competitive generation speeds
• The reduced hardware footprint potentially enables more widespread private deployments

Extended Capabilities

• The 256,000 token context window allows the model to process lengthy documents and maintain conversational history
• Multilingual support covers 23 languages, with specific testing in languages like Arabic

Enterprise Integration

• Command A includes RAG capabilities with citation functionality
• The model works with Cohere's agent platform for integration with business systems

Performance Data and Practical Applications

According to Cohere's evaluations:

• Speed: Command A generates 156 tokens per second, faster than some competing models
• Benchmark Performance: The model shows competitive results on academic benchmarks (MMLU, MATH, IFEval) and business-focused tests (BFCL, Taubench)
• Language Capability: Testing shows the model can generate responses in multiple languages with good accuracy

For organizations deploying the model privately, Cohere suggests potential cost savings of up to 50% compared to API-based access.

Availability

Command A is available through:

• The Cohere platform
• Hugging Face (for research)
• Expected future support from major cloud providers
• Private deployment options

Pricing:

• Input tokens: $2.50 per 1M tokens
• Output tokens: $10.00 per 1M tokens

Summary

Command A represents Cohere's effort to create an efficient, high-performance AI model for enterprise use. By focusing on reducing computing requirements while maintaining competitive capabilities, the model may help organizations deploy AI systems privately with less infrastructure investment.