Cohere Command Light (legacy)

About Cohere

Founded 2019 · Toronto, Canada

Cohere is an enterprise-focused LLM lab founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez (co-author of 'Attention Is All You Need'), Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst (former Google Brain). Headquartered in Toronto with offices in San Francisco, London and New York, Cohere has positioned itself as an enterprise alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic with a focus on retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, multilingual quality and deployment flexibility (SaaS, AWS Bedrock, Azure, Oracle, on-prem via Cohere North). Major investors include Nvidia, Cisco, Salesforce, Oracle and Inovia Capital, with total funding above $1B and a 2024 valuation of approximately $5.5B. The Command family is Cohere's flagship LLM line: Command (2023), Command Light (2023, the small/fast tier), Command R and R+ (2024) and command-r7b (2024).

Architecture

Decoder-only Transformer (Cohere proprietary)

Command Light is the small, fast variant of Cohere's first-generation Command family, launched in 2023 and predating the Command R / R+ release. It is a closed-weight dense decoder-only transformer optimised for low latency and high throughput on simple text tasks — classification, extraction, short summarisation and routing. Cohere has not published exact architecture details (layers, heads, hidden size) or training data composition; the model is distributed only through the Cohere hosted API and was kept intentionally light for high-volume cost-sensitive workloads. Command Light was effectively deprecated when Command R launched in March 2024, though Cohere has maintained backwards-compatible pinned aliases (command-light-nightly) for legacy customers during their support window.

Parameters

Undisclosed (estimated ~6B based on contemporaneous tier siblings)

Context

4,096 tokens

Capabilities

• Very low latency and high throughput for simple text tasks
• Cheap classification and extraction
• Short summarisation and routing decisions
• Stable production behaviour on pinned aliases
• Hosted-only via Cohere API
• Multilingual support for major business languages (limited vs. Command R)
• Effectively deprecated — Cohere directs new builds to Command R / Command R7B
• Best for: legacy pipelines on a planned migration path to Command R.

Training & license

Not publicly disclosed. Cohere-curated web corpora plus proprietary instruction data is the standard 2023 Command-family recipe. Knowledge cutoff approximately early 2023.

License: Cohere Terms of Service. Closed weights — commercial use only via the hosted API. No self-hosting or fine-tuning of base weights for external customers (light custom-model training is available as a managed service).

Safety testing: Internal Cohere safety evaluation; no public red-team report. Refusal behaviour aligned with Cohere's enterprise acceptable-use policy.