Two former Google employees founded a Japanese AI startup together.

DNHN - David Ha, the former head of Google's AI research in Japan, co-founded Sakana AI with Llion Jones, who left the US tech giant this month.

A former Google researcher and co-author of the paper that sparked the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution founded a Tokyo-based AI startup with a former colleague. Copy.

David Ha, the former head of Google's AI research in Japan, co-founded Sakana AI with Llion Jones, who left the US tech giant this month. David Ha led the research at Stability AI most recently.

Llion Jones has an important position at Google, where he has been employed for nearly 12 years. Jones acknowledges that, despite harboring no ill will towards Google, the company's size prevents him from pursuing the work he desires.

Jones told CNBC in an interview, "It's just a byproduct of being at a large company." I believe the bureaucracy has grown to the point where I am unable to accomplish anything."

Jones has a master's degree in advanced computer science from the University of Birmingham, where he studied AI. Jones is one of the eight Google researchers who have collaborated to create software (Transformers) that underpins the development of general artificial intelligence, including chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard and image generators such as Stability. Artificial intelligence, Midjourney, and Dall-E.

The Transformers research paper was published for the first time in June 2017. Since then, all co-authors have left Google, primarily to launch their startups in the talent wars. Globally, AI capabilities are gaining steam. Jones was the final employee to leave Google.

Sakana AI will develop its own generic AI model, which will be capable of generating text, images, code, and other forms of multimedia. It will compete with some of the world's largest artificial intelligence companies, including Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and startups such as Cohere, Character.ai, and Anthropic.

OpenAI, which has brought the concept of generative AI to the masses but has raised billions of dollars from Microsoft and other investors to make it a reality, has been criticized by both Llion Jones and David Ha. David Ha describes OpenAI as "becoming too large and a bit bureaucratic," similar to Google teams.

Jones does not consider OpenAI to be truly innovative. to Llion Jones, with his two biggest successes, ChatGPT and DALL-E (a service that generates images from text prompts), OpenAI applied on a large scale the research he conducted at Google. scale and make modifications, but do not share these enhancements with the community. OpenAI has published articles on some of the underlying systems while not releasing both technologies under an open-source license.

A representative of OpenAI did not respond to CNBC's questions regarding the matter.

David Ha stated that Sakana AI has hired a part-time academic researcher and will recruit more individuals. When asked if Sakana AI has hired any former Google employees, David Ha responded, "Not yet."

The name Sakana, which is derived from the Japanese word for fish, is meant to evoke the notion of "a school of fish coming together and forming a unified entity from simple rules," which is inspired by natural concepts such as evolution and collective intelligence.

Jones and Ha hope to develop AI models based on the principles of evolutionary computing that will address issues such as system cost and security.

They stated that the founders have worked in Japan for several years and chose the Japanese capital as the location for the company's headquarters.

Due to its high-quality technical infrastructure and education workforce, Tokyo is uniquely positioned for the growth of an AI company. It is a global city that is attractive to international talent.

In 2012, Jones became a software engineer for Google's YouTube. 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile, he started "researching machine intelligence and natural language understanding" at Google.

Thu Phuong (T/H)