Ex-Google employees take inspiration from the animal kingdom

Two tech researchers draw inspiration from the animal kingdom, in order to solve some of the most pressing issues in the industry.

By taking cues from the animal realm, such as the coordination of a bee colony or the motions of a school of fish, a brand-new artificial intelligence research center hopes to find solutions to some of the most important issues facing the field.

Sakana, which gets its name from the Japanese word for fish, believes it may be able to accomplish more with less data while many of the leading businesses in the industry compete with one another by constructing ever-larger AI systems. The business wants to create numerous smaller AI models that can cooperate with one another. This kind of technology underpins applications like ChatGPT. It is hypothesized that a "swarm" of programs could be just as intelligent as the big initiatives from more established companies.

Sakana, a company founded by two well-known industry researchers and former Google employees, David Ha and Llion Jones, may produce AI that is less expensive to develop and deploy than current technology. Included in this is generative AI, which has captured Silicon Valley's attention with its capacity to spout text and visuals in reaction to cues. The new company's strategy differs from that of businesses like OpenAI, which might put all of its data into a single, sizable AI program as opposed to a number of smaller ones.

In the field of AI research, Ha and Jones are well-known figures. One of Google's most important publications in the field, "Attention Is All You Need," which serves as the foundation for many of today's most well-liked AI products, was co-authored by Jones, a Tokyo-based AI researcher. The previous chief of research for Stability AI was Ha, who is headquartered in Tokyo. Prior to that, he worked as a scientist at Google Brain in Japan, a division of Alphabet Inc., where he concentrated on generative AI.