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Sakana AI, a startup based in Tokyo and co-founded by two former Google engineers, announced today that it has secured $30 million in seed funding from prominent technology investors. Founded just last year, Sakana AI aims to revolutionize AI by developing smaller, more efficient models inspired by nature.
The seed round was led by Lux Capital, known for investing in pioneering AI companies like Hugging Face, and Khosla Ventures, which invested in OpenAI back in 2019. Major Japanese tech companies like Sony, NTT, and KDDI also participated, showing strong domestic support for Sakana AI.
The name “Sakana,” meaning “fish” in Japanese, reflects the startup’s inspiration from the collective behaviors of animal groups, such as schools of fish and flocks of birds. Sakana AI believes that smaller AI models working together efficiently can outperform the large, single models that many leading AI labs focus on.
Sakana AI’s co-founders, David Ha and Llion Jones, previously led AI research groups at Google. Jones co-authored a pivotal paper on the Transformer model in 2017, which is foundational for chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT today.
Sakana AI’s unique approach contrasts sharply with the current trend in AI, which emphasizes scaling up models to achieve better performance benchmarks. While this method has yielded impressive results, it has also faced criticism for the significant computing resources and environmental impact required. Sakana AI executives argue that as models grow larger, they become less efficient, while smaller, specialized models can collaborate to achieve comparable capabilities. This is akin to groups of people with specialized skills outperforming lone polymaths at complex tasks.
The strong background of Sakana AI’s founders and their innovative vision have attracted top investors from Silicon Valley and Japan. With new capital and partnerships with companies like NTT, Sakana AI plans to expand its team and further develop its nature-inspired AI techniques.
Early support from leading U.S. and Japanese tech investors indicates confidence that Sakana AI could lead a new AI paradigm from Asia, giving Japan a significant role in a technology field currently dominated by the U.S. and China.