Cohere’s first vision model Aya Vision is here with broad, multilingual understanding and open weights — but there’s a catch

Canadian AI startup Cohere launched in 2019 specifically targeting the enterprise, but independent research has shown it has so far struggled to gain much of a market share among third-party developers compared to rival proprietary U.S. model providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, not to mention the rise of Chinese open-source competitor DeepSeek.

Yet Cohere continues to bolster its offerings: Today, its non-profit research division Cohere for AI announced the release of its first vision model, Aya Vision, a new open-weight multimodal AI model that integrates language and vision capabilities and boasts the differentiator of supporting inputs in 23 different languages spoken by what Cohere says in an official blog post is “half the world’s population,” making it appeal to a wide global audience.

Aya Vision is designed to enhance AI’s ability to interpret images, generate text, and translate visual content ...