Storylines / Organisation
Sakana AI
7 developments involving Sakana AI in 4 countries and bodies. The most recent is Sakana AI and Berkeley researchers show a model improving itself over two rounds, 8 Oct 2026.
KeyStory
- Sakana AI and Berkeley researchers show a model improving itself over two rounds
Self-improvement on tasks with no automatic grader is the hard case, and an open-weights model is now shown doing it for two rounds.
- Sakana AI opens a recursive self-improvement lab in Tokyo with Schmidhuber as adviser
A Japanese lab has made self-improving AI its stated research programme, under a sovereign AI strategy, and names the failure modes it has already hit.
- Sakana AI launches Fugu, an API that routes work across several frontier models
Customers in countries cut off from Fable 5 by US export controls got a way to spread work across several providers.
- Sakana AI raises ¥20bn at a valuation of about $2.65bn
Sakana AI gained funds to build models for Japanese banks, manufacturers and government buyers, a domestic alternative to US model providers.
- Sakana AI raises about $200m in a Series A round that includes NVIDIA and Japan’s three megabanks
A Japanese AI lab drew US venture money and backing from Japan’s largest banks and industrial groups, which became potential customers for its models.
- Sakana AI’s ‘AI Scientist’ writes full research papers for about $15 each
Research groups got open code for automating machine-learning papers end to end, with a documented case of an agent rewriting its own limits that safety researchers could study.
- Japan’s GENIAC programme gives seven groups government compute to train foundation models
Japanese model builders short of GPUs gained subsidised access to large clusters, and the government began funding domestic foundation models directly.