(Times of Update) — Nvidia Corp. has joined a more than $100 million funding round for Tokyo startup Sakana AI, one of the largest investments the U.S. chipmaker has made so far in Japan’s nascent artificial intelligence field.
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Sakana, founded in 2023 by two former Google engineers, has secured Series A or seed funding led by New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital. The startup said it will partner with Nvidia on research, access to data centers and “building an AI community” locally.
Sakana, which means “fish” in Japanese, aims to train low-cost generative AI models from small data sets. His team unveiled several AI models for Japanese speakers this year, demonstrating how quickly domestic companies can ramp up their capabilities in this area.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he was particularly drawn to Sakana’s efforts in Japan to popularize AI. His company, which makes the accelerator chips that are driving the global development of generative AI, has since 2023 accelerated its pace of investing in startups.
“Countries are adopting sovereign AI to capture and codify their data, culture, and language through their own unique language models,” Huang said in a statement. “The Sakana AI team is helping to drive the democratization of AI in Japan.”
The Asian country is starting to attract global attention as an AI market. Microsoft Corp. is investing $2.9 billion over two years to build out the country’s data centers and cloud computing infrastructure, while OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman just opened an office in Tokyo. Microsoft is also partnering with SoftBank Corp. on generative AI, while OpenAI is working with Rakuten Group Inc.
Sakana’s approach, valued at about $200 million, contrasts with industry leader OpenAI and others that are spending billions of dollars to train AI on massive data sets. Sakana says its algorithms can help automate the creation of AI models that process language or images by mimicking natural selection as they combine, test and reject data, reducing the amount of human intervention required.
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