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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 collection 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 is 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 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 creating high-performing basis fashions. The thought 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 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 paintings. Most lately, it shared analysis on the AI Scientist, an LLM-based system that automates the whole analysis lifecycle, proper from ideation, writing code, operating experiments and summarizing outcomes to writing total 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 growth. With the collection 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’ll additionally infuse the sources into scaling up the infrastructure of the corporate in partnership with Nvidia.
In a weblog publish revealed in the present day, Sakana stated the Jensen Huang firm will supply infrastructure help on two fronts. First, it is going to present the most recent GPU methods to develop superior fashions utilizing novel methods after which it is going to give entry to Nvidia-powered information facilities inside Japan for operating experiments.
The GPU big can 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 supply 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 growing geopolitical tensions.
“It is a daunting job, 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 imagine our expertise will assist Japan regain a technological edge in AI, and improve its international competitiveness. We additionally purpose to deploy our expertise to help Japan, its establishments and its residents to beat its (AI) challenges within the street forward,” the corporate famous.
Rivals are already eyeing development in Japan
Whereas Sakana continues to achieve traction with its distinctive method to AI growth and unique concentrate on 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 recently, OpenAI Japan’s president Tadao Nagasaki additionally teased a brand new AI mannequin known 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 are attempting to catch up, they’re utilizing the identical methods to coach basis fashions as everybody else.
Sakana AI, then again, is exhibiting the “path to innovation.”