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The AI frenzy is taking on the world. Mere days after China’s Alibaba made headlines with Qwen2-VL, Sakana AI, the Japanese startup based by former Google researchers David Ha and Llion Jones and former diplomat Ren Ito, has introduced it has raised $100 million in a sequence A spherical of funding.
The funding has been led by a number of {industry} heavyweights, together with New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from Nvidia–signaling sturdy traction for the year-old firm. It says it’s going to use the capital in addition to infrastructure help from Nvidia to additional advance its applied sciences and develop right into a world-class AI analysis lab taking up frontier labs, together with these of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Asserting the spherical on X, Ha emphasised the corporate is already working a lot quicker than most AI labs globally and has plans to “push the frontiers of what’s possible with AI” within the coming days.
What Sakana AI has been as much as?
Sakana made a hanging look final 12 months with its high-profile founders and a novel, nature-inspired collective intelligence strategy to growing high-performing basis fashions. The concept was to convey the perfect of a number of smaller AI fashions collectively, very similar to a swarm, to ship complicated outcomes.
Based mostly on this distinctive strategy, and native Japanese datasets, the corporate got here up with a number of fashions, together with these able to producing Japan’s conventional ukiyo-e art work. Most just lately, it shared analysis on the AI Scientist, an LLM-based system that automates all the analysis lifecycle, proper from ideation, writing code, operating experiments and summarizing outcomes to writing whole papers and conducting peer-review.
As the subsequent step on this work, Sakana AI is seeking to scale up its nature-inspired strategy to AI improvement. With the sequence A capital coming from main enterprise capital companies and Nvidia, the corporate plans to hurry up hiring and construct a “talent-dense” AI analysis group. It should additionally infuse the assets into scaling up the infrastructure of the corporate in partnership with Nvidia.
In a weblog put up printed right this moment, Sakana stated the Jensen Huang firm will supply infrastructure help on two fronts. First, it’s going to present the most recent GPU methods to develop superior fashions utilizing novel strategies after which it’s going to give entry to Nvidia-powered knowledge facilities inside Japan for operating experiments.
The GPU large will even assist Sakana run local people and talent-building initiatives like AI hackathons and college outreach packages.
The final word purpose, Sakana says, is to construct a world-class AI lab in Japan to provide superior and energy-efficient AI applied sciences that may assist the nation and its allies deal with the challenges of the twenty first century, together with declining inhabitants, decreased competitiveness, and rising geopolitical tensions.
“This is a daunting task, especially for a small startup company, which will require years of R&D and building long-term relationships with key stakeholders in the nation…We believe our technology will help Japan regain a technological edge in AI, and increase its global competitiveness. We also aim to deploy our technology to assist Japan, its institutions and its citizens to overcome its (AI) challenges in the road ahead,” the corporate famous.
Rivals are already eyeing development in Japan
Whereas Sakana continues to realize traction with its distinctive strategy to AI improvement and unique deal with Japan, OpenAI, which is commonly hailed because the class chief, can also be shifting to develop its footprint within the nation. The Sam Altman-led analysis lab launched a Tokyo hub in April and has already launched a customized GPT-4 mannequin optimized for the Japanese language. Only in the near past, OpenAI Japan’s president Tadao Nagasaki additionally teased a brand new AI mannequin referred to as GPT-Subsequent and stated will probably be 100x higher than the present model.
Aside from that, Canada-based enterprise AI startup Cohere can also be constructing a customized Japanese mannequin on prime of Command R+ in partnership with Fujitsu.
Regardless of the shifting dynamics, traders are bullish on the potential of Sakana. Vinod Khosla, the founding father of Khosla Ventures, famous that whereas many labs globally try to catch up, they’re utilizing the identical strategies to coach basis fashions as everybody else.
Sakana AI, then again, is exhibiting the “path to innovation.”
