[NEWS] Japanese AI startup Sakana AI receives investment from three megabanks and NEC

Ten major Japanese companies, including three megabanks, have decided to invest in Sakana AI, a large-scale language model developed in Japan.

Major life insurance companies, securities companies, NEC, and Itochu Corporation will also participate, providing a total of 10 billion yen in funding. This brings the total amount raised in Series A to 30 billion yen.

Sakana AI was founded in Japan by AI development researchers at Google. Recently, the US company NVIDIA invested in the company. Other investors include leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Translink Capital, and 500Global.

A consortium of Japanese companies will also participate as investors, and the plan is to collaborate on services using AI.

Financial institutions participating in the fund include Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (FG), Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Mizuho Financial Group; companies include NEC, KDDI, and Fujitsu; life insurance company Dai-ichi Life; securities companies include SBI Group and Nomura Holdings; and trading company Itochu Group. Leading Japanese VCs include Global Brain, JAFCO, and Miyako Capital, who continued to invest. For Sakana AI, which wants to inspire the world in AI development, it is extremely important to receive investment from leading Silicon Valley VCs and global companies like NVIDIA, but at the same time, it is special to receive investment from Japanese companies and build partnerships. Sakana AI was founded in Japan and is looking to expand globally from Japan. It values ​​Japanese culture and customs and has set its primary mission as contributing to solving problems in Japanese society.

Bringing further innovation to AI

Mitsubishi UFJFG CEO Hiroki Kamezawa said in a statement, "We believe that AI will become a game changer that will penetrate our lives and the services we use, bringing about major changes to the business models of many companies."

He also said, "We believe that Sakana AI is a startup company that will create new value from Japan to the world with unprecedented ideas, such as the development of 'Evolutionary Model Merging,' which combines a wide range of models with various capabilities to build a new foundational model, and 'AI Scientist,' which is the first attempt to fully automate the entire scientific research process. We hope that MUFG's AI strategy will become even more advanced by utilizing Sakana AI's high technical capabilities and innovative model development methods."

AI Scientist is a revolutionary technology that attempts scientific research autonomously. When faced with an imposed time commitment, instead of trying to shorten the execution time, it will edit the code to increase the time limit.

However, this new technology also carries risks, and if left unmonitored, it could unintentionally destroy existing infrastructure if deemed inconvenient, or create malware to attack.

To reduce this risk, Sakana AI proposes addressing safety concerns by sandboxing the operating environment of AI scientists, which would prevent sabotage by AI agents. However, it is also true that the misuse of AI scientists would give nations an advantage in IT attacks, and calls for their militarization are growing.

Reference: Announcement
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