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The AI frenzy is taking up 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’ll use the capital in addition to infrastructure assist 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 sooner than most AI labs globally and has plans to “push the frontiers of what’s doable with AI” within the coming days.
What Sakana AI has been as much as?
Sakana made a putting look final yr with its high-profile founders and a novel, nature-inspired collective intelligence method to growing high-performing basis fashions. The concept was to deliver the perfect of a number of smaller AI fashions collectively, very like a swarm, to ship complicated outcomes.
Based mostly on this distinctive method, 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 lately, it shared analysis on the AI Scientist, an LLM-based system that automates the whole analysis lifecycle, proper from ideation, writing code, working experiments and summarizing outcomes to writing whole papers and conducting peer-review.
As the following step on this work, Sakana AI is trying to scale up its nature-inspired method to AI improvement. With the sequence A capital coming from main enterprise capital corporations and Nvidia, the corporate plans to hurry up hiring and construct a “talent-dense” AI analysis group. It’s going to additionally infuse the assets into scaling up the infrastructure of the corporate in partnership with Nvidia.
In a weblog submit printed at present, Sakana stated the Jensen Huang firm will supply infrastructure assist on two fronts. First, it’ll present the most recent GPU methods to develop superior fashions utilizing novel methods after which it’ll give entry to Nvidia-powered knowledge facilities inside Japan for working experiments.
The GPU large can even assist Sakana run area people and talent-building initiatives like AI hackathons and college outreach applications.
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.
“It is a daunting process, particularly for a small startup firm, which would require years of R&D and constructing long-term relationships with key stakeholders within the nation…We consider our know-how will assist Japan regain a technological edge in AI, and enhance its international competitiveness. We additionally goal to deploy our know-how to help Japan, its establishments and its residents to beat its (AI) challenges within the highway forward,” the corporate famous.
Rivals are already eyeing development in Japan
Whereas Sakana continues to realize traction with its distinctive method to AI improvement and unique concentrate on Japan, OpenAI, which is usually hailed because the class chief, can also be shifting to increase 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 recently, OpenAI Japan’s president Tadao Nagasaki additionally teased a brand new AI mannequin known as GPT-Subsequent and stated it will likely 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 are attempting to catch up, they’re utilizing the identical methods to coach basis fashions as everybody else.
Sakana AI, however, is exhibiting the “path to innovation.”
