alt Hacker NewsThere are so many derisive comments here.
David Ha, CEO and co-founder, was one of the youngest managing director at Goldman Sachs before doing ML at Google. His ML publications were considered top-notch almost a decade ago. I had high hopes for him when he raised money and founded Sakana.
I do agree with some comments here that perhaps this particular product is not well thought out. I also agree with the criticism that David calls Sakana a frontier AI lab while making money just selling AI B2B applications to Japanese businesses. I also agree with the assessment that Sakana has abrasive and antagonistic, sometimes openly hostile, recruiting tactics. I also agree that his then-impressive publications may have lost their luster in the age of LLMs.
However, the man is clearly driven; and he and his team may have more to offer in future. I admire the man for not taking the conventional AI-research career path.
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Kind of shocking - a model comes out that beats mythos and offers a reasonable price and it ... gets downvoted?
Probably taking hate from both sides - OpenAI / Claude fans who are undercutting its moat. Chinese open-model fans that want it to be cheaper.
But it's a genuine accomplishment to hit those benchmarks and offer a reasonable plan?
Bizarre reaction TBH.
Indeed. The world models research many labs are now chasing was to some degree ignited by David Ha and Schmidhuber's 2018 paper.
More broadly, Sakana is pursing a refreshingly distinct research path, with their focus on evolutionary methods, biological intelligence (e.g. continuous thought machines) and open publication.