The artificial intelligence startup Sakana AI, based in Tokyo and founded by two well-known former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $30 million in a seed financing round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures. According to Lux Capital partner Grace Isford, Sakana AI aims to establish Tokyo as a hub for AI, much like OpenAI did for San Francisco and DeepMind did for London. The company, which does not yet have any products on the market, is looking to improve today’s AI systems fundamentally by having a large number of smaller models communicate and work together rather than creating one giant monolithic model.
David Ha and Llion Jones, two former Google researchers, are the company’s founders.
Jones is the fifth author of the “Attention Is All You Need” research paper from Google, published in 2017. This work introduced the “transformer” deep learning architecture, which later served as the foundation for the popular chatbot ChatGPT and the ongoing competition to create products using generative AI.
Ha was once a Google Brain researcher and the head of research at Stability AI.
The writers of the paper “Attention Is All You Need” have all departed from Google. Millions of dollars have been invested in their new endeavors by venture capitalists such as Noam Shazeer, founder of the AI chatbot business Character.AI, and Aidan Gomez, founder of the huge language model startup Cohere.
