Sakana AI

Sakana AI is a Tokyo-based AI research laboratory founded in 2023 by David Ha (former Google Brain Research Director) and Llion Jones (co-author of the original Transformer paper, former Google). The lab focuses on nature-inspired and evolutionary approaches to AI, developing systems for automated scientific discovery and algorithm evolution. Notable work includes The AI Scientist autonomous research system and ShinkaEvolve, an open-source LLM-evolutionary framework for algorithm discovery accepted at ICLR 2026.