Sakana AI Gets IDR 468.8 Billion Funds In The Initial Funding Financing Round

Sakana AI, Tokyo-based artificial intelligence startup (photo: x V)

JAKARTA - Sakana AI, Tokyo-based artificial intelligence startup and founded by two leading Google researchers, announced on Tuesday January 16 that it had raised 30 million US dollars (IDR 468.8 billion) in an initial funding financing round led by Lux Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures.

"Sakana AI wants to make Tokyo a center of artificial intelligence, similar to what OpenAI is doing for San Francisco and DeepMind for London," said Lux Capital partner Grace Isford.

The company, which does not yet have products on the market, is trying to make fundamental improvements to the current artificial intelligence system by having a large number of small models that communicate and work together, instead of creating a giant monolithic model.

They will also work to develop more appropriate artificial intelligence models for the Asian market as Asian character-based languages function very differently from Western languages.

"Asian languages are lacking exploration because most major language models are developed for Western languages," said Lux Capital partner Brandon Reeves.

The founders of the company are previous Google researchers, such as David Ha and Llion Jones.

Jones is the fifth author in a 2017 Google research paper entitled "Attention Is All You Need," which introduces an in-depth "transformer" learning architecture that later becomes the basis for ChatGPT's viral chatbots and current races to develop products powered by generative artificial intelligence.

Ha previously served as head of research at AI Stability and Google Brain researchers.

All the authors in the paper "Attention Is All You Need" have left Google. Their new venture has withdrawn millions of dollars in funding from venture investors, including Noam Shazeer, who runs chatbot startups AI, Character.AI, and total Gomez, who founded major language model startup Cohere.

Lux Capital is a venture capital firm that specializes in advanced technology, investing in industries such as aerospace, artificial intelligence, and biology.