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khurs·

https://sakana.ai/company-info/?lang=en

1 x Co-author of the landmark "Attention Is All You Need" paper

1 x google researcher

20+ big name investors funding

Founded July 2023 so been working on it a few years, it may fall short but they have the money and talent to be potentially decent.

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But did they deliver anything yet? There are many startups with notable founders that are not being able to get models launched. And even if they are able to launch, so they get PMF. In case of Sakana, they clearly focus on the Japanese market an have buildup a good pipeline on sovereign AI. But similar to Aleph Alpha or to a certain extend Mistral, I don't see how they can keep up.

I live in Japan and yet can't seem to pay for their API in JPY... I bet their enterprise customers don't have that problem but it was pretty annoying given "AI in Japan" appears to be there only selling point.

The only way they can compete in Japan is the enterprise-game. Their partnership with Daiwa and MUFG is probably exactly what they should be doing. I doubt that they get that far though. Like Mistral who has partnerships with BNP Paribas and Airbus, they deploy in an on-premise or private cloud and in those settings, their models make good PoC's but cant compete where it gets interesting -- Workspace Agents. If you look at them from a Chatbot over RAG perspective, maybe they can do it. But that's tech from 2023.

I think every country/major country at the government level will back any home grown talent in view of USA restrictions.

The models don't need to be as good, just good enough for the task. I am using a Claude Q3 2024 model mostly (Haiku 4.5) at present, and it delivers what I need.

That paper had many co-authors and only two who were considered to be the primary drivers and geniuses behind (and they are american citizens).

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