Sakana AI, a new artificial intelligence startup based in Tokyo was founded by former leading Google researchers.
Generative AI – artistic interpretation.
On Tuesday, it was announced that the new venture successfully secured $30 million in a seed financing round. The startup aims to establish Tokyo as a prominent AI hub, drawing parallels with how OpenAI and DeepMind influenced San Francisco and London.
Although Sakana AI has yet to launch any products, its approach involves enhancing current AI systems by facilitating extensive communication among numerous smaller models instead of relying on a single large monolithic model.
Additionally, the company plans to tailor its AI models to better suit the Asian market, considering the distinct nature of Asian character-based languages compared to Western languages.
The founders of Sakana AI are former Google researchers David Ha and Llion Jones. Jones, the fifth author of Google’s influential 2017 research paper “Attention Is All You Need,” contributed to the development of the “transformer” deep learning architecture, serving as the foundation for the popular ChatGPT chatbot and fueling the current trend in generative AI-powered products.
Ha, previously the head of research at Stability AI and a Google Brain researcher, also joined in founding Sakana AI.
All authors of the “Attention Is All You Need” paper have since departed Google, and their new ventures have attracted substantial funding from venture investors, including Noam Shazeer, leading AI chatbot startup Character.AI, and Aidan Gomez, founder of the large language model startup Cohere.
Written by Alius Noreika