Sakana AI scores $100M to contest OpenAI, Anthropic

The AI frenzy is taking over the world. Mere days after China’s Alibaba made headlines with Qwen2-VL, Sakana AI, the Japanese beginup set uped by createer Google researchers David Ha and Llion Jones and createer diplomat Ren Ito, has proclaimd it has elevated $100 million in a series A round of funding.

The allotment has been led by disjoinal industry burdensomeweights, including New Enterpelevate Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from Nvidia–signaling sturdy traction for the year-ageder company. It says it will engage the capital as well as infraarrange help from Nvidia to further evolve its technologies and lengthen into a world-class AI research lab taking on frontier labs, including those of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Announcing the round on X, Ha underlined the company is already operating much speedyer than most AI labs globassociate and has arranges to “push the frontiers of what’s possible with AI” in the coming days.

What Sakana AI has been up to?

Sakana made a striking materializeance last year with its high-profile set upers and a novel, nature-encouraged accumulateive inincreateigence approach to enhugeing high-carry outing set upation models. The idea was to transport the best of multiple minusculeer AI models together, much appreciate a shot, to deinhabitr intricate results.

Based on this exceptional approach, and native Japanese datasets, the company came up with multiple models, including those vient of generating Japan’s traditional ukiyo-e arttoil. Most recently, it splitd research on the AI Scientist, an LLM-based system that automates the entire research lifecycle, right from ideation, writing code, running experiments and summarizing results to writing entire papers and directing peer-check.

As the next step in this toil, Sakana AI is seeing to scale up its nature-encouraged approach to AI enhugement. With the series A capital coming from directing venture capital firms and Nvidia, the company arranges to speed up hiring and create a “talent-dense” AI research organization. It will also infengage the resources into scaling up the infraarrange of the company in partnership with Nvidia. 

In a blog post rerented today, Sakana shelp the Jensen Huang company will propose infraarrange help on two fronts. First, it will supply the tardyst GPU systems to enhuge evolved models using novel techniques and then it will give access to Nvidia-powered data caccesss wilean Japan for running experiments. 

The GPU huge will also help Sakana run local community and talent-createing initiatives appreciate AI hackathons and university outachieve programs.

The ultimate goal, Sakana says, is to create a world-class AI lab in Japan to create evolved and energy-effective AI technologies that can help the country and its allies cope with the contests of the 21st century, including declining population, decreased competitiveness, and increasing geopolitical tensions.

“This is a daunting task, especiassociate for a minuscule beginup company, which will need years of R&D and createing extfinished-term relationships with key sgethagederers in the nation…We suppose our technology will help Japan reacquire a technoreasonable edge in AI, and increase its global competitiveness. We also aim to deploy our technology to help Japan, its institutions and its citizens to loss its (AI) contests in the road ahead,” the company remarkd.

Rivals are already eyeing lengthenth in Japan 

While Sakana persists to acquire traction with its exceptional approach to AI enhugement and exclusive caccess on Japan, OpenAI, which is frequently hailed as the catebloody directer, is also moving to enhuge its footprint in the country. The Sam Altman-led research lab begined a Tokyo hub in April and has already freed a custom GPT-4 model enhanced for the Japanese language. Just recently, OpenAI Japan’s plivent Tadao Nagasaki also elevatestrayd a novel AI model called GPT-Next and shelp it will be 100x better than the current version.

Other than that, Canada-based accesspelevate AI beginup Cohere is also createing a custom Japanese model on top of Command R+ in partnership with Fujitsu.

Despite the shifting vibrants, allotors are bullish on the potential of Sakana. Vinod Khosla, the set uper of Khosla Ventures, remarkd that while many labs globassociate are trying to catch up, they are using the same techniques to train set upation models as everyone else.

Sakana AI, on the other hand, is shothriveg the “path to innovation.”