ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 9 Cohere releases since Mar 2025, most recently North Micro Vision on Aug 13, 2026. Highlights include Transcribe Arabic, Cohere Transcribe, Command A+, North Micro Vision. 7 of them shipped with open weights. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live, plus key numbers where we have them.
Cohere North Micro Vision: 2.4B VLM under Apache 2.0
Cohere released North Micro Vision, a 2.4B-parameter vision-language model under Apache 2.0 scoring 92.1% on DocVQA. Weights are on Hugging Face.
Cohere open-sources Transcribe Arabic, topping the Arabic ASR leaderboard
A 2B-parameter Apache 2.0 speech-to-text model that leads the Hugging Face Arabic ASR leaderboard at 25.87 WER — about 11 points better than Whisper Large V3 — with human evaluators preferring it in roughly 96% of head-to-head tests. Handles dialect variety, code-switching and Arabic-English bilingual speech, with day-0 mlx-audio support.
Cohere releases Command A+, a 218B Apache 2.0 MoE with 25B active params
Cohere released Command A+, a 218B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 25B active parameters, shipping open weights under Apache 2.0. It was the week's headline open-source release, available on Hugging Face in both W4A4 quantized and BF16 variants.
Cohere Transcribe: open-source 2B ASR tops Open ASR Leaderboard at 5.42% WER
Cohere entered the ASR game with Transcribe, a 2-billion-parameter Apache 2.0 speech recognition model that immediately took the number-one spot on Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard with a 5.42% word error rate versus Whisper Large v3's 7.44%. It wins 61% of human evaluations on average and 64% head-to-head against Whisper, making it a credible local-inference Whisper replacement for regulated industries.
Cohere Labs releases Tiny Aya, a 3.35B multilingual model for 70+ languages
Cohere Labs released Tiny Aya, a 3.35B-parameter multilingual model family supporting 70+ languages that is small enough to run locally on phones. It extends Cohere's Aya line of open multilingual models, bringing broad language coverage to on-device deployments.
Cohere Labs paper accuses Chatbot Arena (LMArena) of structural bias
Cohere Labs published 'The Leaderboard Illusion,' claiming LMArena lets big incumbents privately A/B-test dozens of model variants (Meta ran 27 hidden Llama-4 variants in a month), cherry-pick top scores, and receive far more battle data, inflating Elo ratings. LMArena responded that the leaderboard reflects real human preferences and pre-release testing is open to all providers.
Cohere Embed 4: multimodal embeddings for enterprise search
Cohere released Embed 4, a multimodal embedding model aimed at enterprise search and retrieval over mixed text and image documents. It is available through Cohere's API.
Cohere Command A: 111B enterprise model with 256K context on just 2 GPUs
Cohere announced Command A, a 111B parameter open-weights model with a 256K context window, presented on the show by Cohere's Sandra Kublik. It runs on only two GPUs where models of this size typically require around 32, and is built for enterprise use: agentic tasks, tool use, multilingual performance, and secure private deployments.
Cohere For AI releases Aya Vision 8B and 32B open multilingual vision models
Cohere For AI released Aya Vision in 8B and 32B sizes, extending the multilingual Aya family with open-weights vision-language capabilities. The models target multilingual multimodal understanding across many languages.
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