-- A new artificial intelligence research lab aims to solve the field’s most pressing problems by drawing inspiration from the animal kingdom — like the movements of a school of fish or the coordination of a colony of bees.
Founded by two prominent industry researchers, former Google employees David Ha and Llion Jones, Sakana’s approach could potentially lead to AI that’s cheaper to train and use than existing technology. That includes generative AI, which has captivated Silicon Valley with its ability to spit out text and images in response to prompts.
Ha and Jones are marquee names in the world of AI research. Jones, a Tokyo-based AI researcher, co-authored one of Google’s most influential papers in the field, “Attention Is All You Need,” which underpins many of today’s most popular AI products. Ha, also based in Tokyo, was previously Stability AI’s head of research. Before that, he focused on generative AI while working as a scientist at Alphabet Inc.’s Google Brain in Japan.
But the ideas Sakana is working with are more established. Near the end of his time at Google, Ha and a colleague launched a project dubbed “sensory neuron as a transformer,” and deployed a fleet of small AI models to work together to play a game, rather than using one large model. Other researchers have also taken inspiration from the workings of the human brain.