Cohere Just Made Command R+ Better and Cheaper at the Same Time
The August 2024 refresh hits the trifecta nobody expected from an enterprise AI shop.
Better, cheaper, faster — simultaneously — became the standard release pattern for every AI provider. Cohere did it first and then everyone followed. The conventional deal broke permanently.
Cohere shipped an August refresh of Command R+ today — c4ai-command-r-plus-08-2024 in the HuggingFace namespace, if you want the unambiguous version — and the changelog is the kind that makes you briefly distrust your own reading comprehension.
Better across the board. Meaningfully improved on conversational tool use specifically. Also cheaper. Also faster.
All three. At once.
The conventional deal you make with AI vendors is: you get one. Better costs more. Cheaper means slower or dumber. Faster means you're on the smaller model. Cohere apparently didn't get the memo, or got it and threw it away.
The tool use improvement is the part worth paying attention to. Command R+ was already the model people reached for when they needed agentic pipelines that didn't hallucinate function signatures — that was basically its whole identity, the enterprise RAG-and-tools play while everyone else was chasing benchmark crowns. Making that specific thing noticeably better is not a minor tune-up.
Whether this matters to you depends on whether you're already in the Cohere ecosystem or actively avoiding it. If you're not, the price cut at least makes the curiosity tax lower.
The weights are on HuggingFace, which is the part that tends to matter six months from now when the hosted API pricing changes again.
Counterpoints
Push back, extend the argument, or sharpen it. New counterpoints go through review before they show up here.
No approved counterpoints yet.