There 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.
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.
so he's the quintessential brilliant jerk, ok
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.
Which model is that? What is it named?
Not OP but I believe it’s Fugu (7B). According to [0]: “Fugu itself is a trained coordinator LLM.”
[0] https://dev.classmethod.jp/en/articles/sakana-fugu-ga-first-...