AI is taking over the world by leaps and bounds. Just days after making headlines with China’s Alibaba Qwen2-VL, Source AIThe Japanese startup founded by former Google researchers David Ha and Llion Jones and ex-diplomat Ren Ito has announced that it has raised $100 million in a round of funding.
The investment is led by several industry heavyweights, including New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from Nvidia—signaling strong traction for the year-old company. It says it will use capital and infrastructure support from Nvidia to further advance its technology and grow into a world-class AI research lab, taking on Frontier Labs including OpenAI and Anthropic.
Announcing the round at XHa emphasized that the company is already working much faster than most AI labs globally and plans to “push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI” in the coming days.
What is Sakana AI doing?
So I a attractive appearance Last year with its high-profile founders and a novel, nature-inspired collective intelligence approach to developing high-performance foundational models. The idea was to bring together multiple small AI models, like a swarm, to produce complex results.
Based on this unique approach and original Japanese datasets, the company has come up with multiple models capable of generating Traditional ukiyo-e artwork of Japan. Recently, he shared research on this AI scientistAn LLM-based system that automates the entire research lifecycle, from ideation, writing code, running experiments, and summarizing results to writing and peer-reviewing entire papers.
As a next step in this work, Sakana AI is looking to enhance its nature-inspired approach to AI development. With Series A capital coming from leading venture capital firms and Nvidia, the company plans to accelerate hiring and build a “talent-dense” AI research organization. It will also use resources to enhance the company’s infrastructure in partnership with Nvidia.
In A Blog post Published today, Sakana said the Jensen Huang company will offer infrastructure support on two fronts. First, it will provide the latest GPU systems to develop advanced models using innovative technologies and then provide access to Nvidia-powered data centers in Japan to run those experiments.
The GPU giant will also help Sakana run talent-building initiatives like local community and AI hackathons and university outreach programs.
The ultimate goal, Sakana says, is to build a world-class AI lab in Japan to produce advanced and energy-efficient AI technologies that can help the country and its allies meet 21st-century challenges, including a shrinking population, declining competitiveness is , and increased geopolitical tensions.
“This is a daunting task, especially for a small startup company, which will require years of R&D and long-term relationships with the country’s key stakeholders…We believe our technology will help Japan regain the technological edge in AI, and its potential will increase. Global competitiveness. We also aim to use our technology to help Japan, its institutions and its citizens meet its (AI) challenges on the road ahead,” the company noted.
Rivals are already eyeing growth in Japan
While Sakana continues to gain traction with its unique approach to AI development and special focus on Japan, OpenAI, often hailed as a category leader, is also moving to expand its footprint in the country. A research laboratory headed by Sam Altman Launched Tokyo hub in April and has already released a custom GPT-4 model optimized for the Japanese language. Recently, OpenAI Japan President Tadao Nagasaki also teased a new AI model called GPT-Next, saying it will be 100x better than the current version.
Apart from that, a Canada-based enterprise AI startup Coher It is also making Custom Japanese model on top of the Command R+ in partnership with Fujitsu.
Despite the changing dynamics, investors are bullish on Sakana’s potential. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, noted that while many labs globally are trying to catch up, they are using the same techniques as everyone else to train foundation models.
Sakana AI, on the other hand, is showing “the way to innovation.”
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