Sakana AI Co, Ltd. is a Japanese artificial intelligence company based in

Tokyo Tokyo, officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan, capital and List of cities in Japan, most populous city in Japan. With a population of over 14 million in the city proper in 2023, it is List of largest cities, one of the most ...

Overview

Sakana AI's main research fields are evolution and

collective intelligence Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that Emergence, emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiolog ...

of AI. The company's name is derived from the Japanese word さかな (sakana), which means fish. This represents the idea of a school of fish coming together and forming a coherent entity from simple rules, which is an analogy of collective intelligence. The company was founded by David Ha, Llion Jones and Ren Ito. Llion Jones co-authored the famous paper "

Attention Is All You Need "Attention Is All You Need" is a 2017 landmark research paper in machine learning authored by eight scientists working at Google. The paper introduced a new deep learning architecture known as the transformer, based on the attention mechanism p ...

" when he was working for

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

in 2017. The company raised $30M in its seed funding round from

Lux Capital Lux Capital is a venture capital firm based in New York City. It was founded in 2000, and focuses on investments in emerging technologies. History Lux Capital was founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Robert Paull and Josh Wolfe. In April 2011, for ...

and

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is a private American venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in 2004. The firm works with early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile technology, artifici ...

. The company raised approximately $200M from companies such as Mitsubishi UFJ,

SMBC SMBC may refer to: Companies and organizations * SMBC Aviation Capital, an aircraft leasing company associated with the bank * Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, a bank based in Japan * Sydney Missionary and Bible College Government and politics ...

Mizuho Mizuho () literally means "abundant rice" in Japanese and "harvest" in the figurative sense. It was also an Names of Japan#Other names, ancient name of Japan. It might refer to: Places * Mizuho, Gifu, a city in Gifu * Mizuho, Tokyo, a town in To ...

Itochu is a Japanese corporation based in Umeda, Kita-ku, Osaka and Aoyama, Minato, Tokyo, Aoyama, Minato, Tokyo. It is one of the largest Japanese ''sogo shosha'' (general trading and investment companies) distinguished by the strength of its textil ...

KDDI () is a Japanese telecommunications operator. It was established in 2000 through the merger of , , and . In 2001, it merged with a subsidiary named Au, which was formed through the merger of seven automotive and mobile phone companies from t ...

Nomura Nomura (written: 野村 "field village" or 埜村 "wilderness village") is a Japanese surname. Notable people with the surname include: * , Japanese volleyball player * , Japanese-American baseball agent * , Japanese voice actor, including in t ...

and

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

in its series A funding round in 2024. In January 2024, Sakana AI developed a method to build new AI models by 'breeding' multiple existing models, which it sees as a means to democratise AI development, as this process does not require large computational resources. Sakana AI is also developing a model called the AI Scientist, which automates the entire process of scientific research. ''

The Nikkei ''The Nikkei'', also known as , is the flagship publication of Nikkei, Inc. (based in Tokyo) and the world's largest financial newspaper, with a daily circulation exceeding 1.73 million copies. The Nikkei 225, a stock market index for the Tokyo ...

'' estimated the company's value at 19 billion yen in 2024.{{Cite web , date=2024-12-26 , title=リージョナルフィッシュ､企業価値400億円超に関西未上場スタートアップで首位 , url=https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF20BQ90Q4A221C2000000/ , access-date=2024-12-29 , website=日本経済新聞 , language=ja

References

2023 establishments Companies based in Tokyo Artificial intelligence companies 2023 in artificial intelligence

Overview

See also

References