iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The program features a keynote and Q&A by Jürgen and short talks by Sakana AI researchers on our work at the RSI Lab. - Date: Monday, October 26, 2026, 15:00–18:00 JST - Venue: Hitotsubashi Hall, Tokyo - Language: English - Admission: Free (registration required) Register here: luma.com/kjf0z516 🐟

luma.com

From World Models to Real-World AI｜日本から拓くAIの新時代 · Luma

Symposium with Jürgen Schmidhuber 人工知能の次の時代は、デジタルの枠を超え、物理世界そのものへと広がっていきます。その一つの鍵になるのが、世界モデル（World…

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Registration now open: From World Models to Real-World AI Luma: luma.com/kjf0z516 Join us on October 26 in Tokyo for a symposium with Jürgen Schmidhuber, who recently joined Sakana AI as Chief Scientific Advisor.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

【受付開始】From World Models to Real-World AI — 日本から拓くAIの新時代 Chief Scientific Advisorとして当社に参画したJürgen Schmidhuber博士を迎えるシンポジウムを、10月26日（月）に東京・一橋講堂で開催します。本日より一般申し込みを開始しました。Schmidhuber博士による基調講演とQ&A、 CEO David Haとの対談、Sakana AI研究者によるショート講演を予定しています。お申し込みはこちら： luma.com/kjf0z516 🐟

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Recently learned that Schmidhuber’s Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity, covering compression progress and intrinsic motivation and their relationship to beauty, curiosity, art, science, music, and jokes, was published in a Japanese scientific journal in 2009. www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sice...

Simple Algorithmic Theory of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

Jürgen SCHMIDHUBER

Abstract

In this summary of previous work, I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively more “beautiful.” Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, “truly novel,” regular data that allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known. This drive maximizes “interestingness,” the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and recent artificial systems.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The new Sakana AI website is live. 🐡 We have updated our digital home to reflect our products, enterprise solutions, and latest research. Sakana AIの新サイトを公開しました。エンタープライズ事例やApplied Teamの採用情報も更新しています。ぜひご覧ください！ sakana.ai

sakana.ai

Sakana AI

We are creating a new kind of foundation model based on nature-inspired intelligence.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Our name and logo are inspired by schools of fish moving together, adapting as one. It is the core philosophy of what we build. This book captures the theoretical foundations of that belief. neuroevolutionbook.com

neuroevolutionbook.com

Neuroevolution

An MIT Press Book by Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, David Ha, and Risto Miikkulainen.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The concepts in this book about open-ended creativity and self-organizing systems are exactly what we build at @sakanaai.bsky.social

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This idea, that intelligence emerges from evolution operating under constraints rather than unlimited resources, is what eventually led me to founding Sakana AI here in Japan. a.co/d/06DpkH9h

a.co

Amazon.com

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Neuroevolution is a subject very dear to my heart. It is the field that convinced me that nature has already figured out how to build intelligence: through evolution, collective behavior, and adaptation under constraints. neuroevolutionbook.com

neuroevolutionbook.com

Neuroevolution

An MIT Press Book by Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, David Ha, and Risto Miikkulainen.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Our Neuroevolution textbook is finally in print! Free online edition: neuroevolutionbook.com Pre-order: a.co/d/06DpkH9h I am incredibly grateful to my co-authors Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, and Risto Miikkulainen for making this happen. Thread:

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Introducing "Scaling In-Context Imitation Learning" (SAIL) to be presented at #IROS2026. This work is a collaboration between Sakana AI and the University of Tokyo. Blog: pub.sakana.ai/sail Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.08269 What does a robot need before it can tackle a new task? Thread:

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Follow Sakana AI on IG → SakanaAILabs

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Sakana AI is on Instagram now. www.instagram.com/sakanaailabs

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

These ideas inspired the Darwin Gödel Machine and The AI Scientist. Our RSI Lab in Tokyo, now under Jürgen’s guidance, is working on agent-native world models and recursive self-improvement for physical AI. sakana.ai/schmidhuber

sakana.ai

Sakana AI

The Next Frontier: Welcoming AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber to Sakana AI

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Jürgen Schmidhuber pioneered meta-learning, recursive self-improvement, and world models back in the 1990s, when compute was a million times more expensive. He has been thinking about machines that improve themselves since before compute was cheap enough to make it practical.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Sakana AI welcomes Jürgen Schmidhuber as Chief Scientific Advisor. Blog: sakana.ai/schmidhuber/ Sakana AI is incredibly proud to announce that Jürgen Schmidhuber, universally recognized as the father of modern AI, is officially joining Sakana AI as Chief Scientific Advisor.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

🐙 Fugu Max is now on Sakana Chat 🐙 Free for all to use. Try it: chat.sakana.ai Blog: sakana.ai/chat-fugumax... 🐡

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

日経新聞による、グーグルディープマインド東京を率いる全炳河（Heiga Zen）氏の素晴らしい特集記事。2018年、Heigaさんと2人でGoogle Brain東京チームを立ち上げた日々を懐かしく思います。当時は時差の厳しい深夜の会議をこなしながら、日本のAI研究の存在感を示すために必死でした。現在、彼がGDM Tokyoを率い、私が Sakana AI を起業して、東京のAIエコシステムがここまで大きく成長したことを本当に嬉しく思います！ www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZ...

nikkei.com

GoogleのAI部門支える全炳河氏　生成AIの到来、デビッド氏はサカナに - 日本経済新聞

気がつけば英国に来てから10年がたっていました。WaveNet（ウェーブネット）で燃え尽き、新しいチャレンジを求めていました。家族のことも考えるとそろそろ潮時ではないか。そう考えて日本で人工知能（AI）の研究開発をさせてくれそうな会社をいくつか受け始めました。その当時のグーグルは日本ではほとんどAI研究開発をしていなかったのです。米テック大手の日本法人やAIスタートアップなど複数社からオファー

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

🐡 Sakana Fugu Max is now on Chat 🐡 Sakana Chat just got another big upgrade, following our August update. Two things shipped today: ・Sakana Fugu Max is now integrated, in addition to Namazu ・Memory feature is here Try Sakana Chat: chat.sakana.ai Read more: sakana.ai/chat-fugumax...

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Introducing PC-ALM: a local-learning alternative to backprop that trains 1000-layer neural nets using only local dynamics. Blog: pub.sakana.ai/pc-alm/

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The takeaway: the next leap in AI will not come from just scaling next-token prediction, but from systems that are agentic, self-referential, and temporally grounded. What do you think is the most important missing ingredient in today's AI systems? Link: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/issue/3...

royalsocietypublishing.org

Volume 384 Issue 2320 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A | The Royal Society

Influential themed journal issues across the physical mathematical and engineering sciences.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

If world modeling is about an agent representing itself in its environment, then general AI may need to look more like artificial life.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Third, the hardest problems in AI are continuous with the hardest problems of life. Biological minds actively explore, driven by empowerment to increase control over their environment.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Second, self-modeling is an engineering primitive. When networks predict their own states, they compress and become more efficient.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Here are 3 ideas that might redefine how we build AI: First, capability is not true intelligence. Current models learn surface statistics instead of compact causal abstractions, and scaling compute will not fix this.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

“World Models in Natural and Artificial Intelligence” brings together pioneers including Douglas Hofstadter, Michael Levin, Josh Tenenbaum, Samuel Gershman, and Melanie Mitchell to ask: What if the next leap in AI requires not just more data, but systems that model themselves?

royalsocietypublishing.org

World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence

Abstract. This special issue examines how natural and artificial intelligences (AIs) model the world, and what this modelling reveals about cognition and r

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Do large language models actually understand the world, or are they just very good at pretending? Does it even matter? Our recent Royal Society special issue explores this: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/issue/3...

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Peak performance across hard benchmarks: • Best on 5/8 benchmarks (DeepSWE, Chartography, Toolathon, GDP.pdf, SWEFish) • Chartography: 48.3 (outperforming Opus 5 & Fable 5) • DeepSWE: 74.3 Achieved without Fable 5, Fable 5.1, or GPT-6-Astra in the agent pool. More Info: sakana.ai/fugu-max-rel...

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Fugu Ultra v2 is now live on OpenRouter! 🐡 openrouter.ai/sakana/fugu-... Our flagship orchestration engine built for peak performance on complex multi-step reasoning, autonomous research, and full-stack software development.

openrouter.ai

Fugu Ultra v2 - API Pricing & Providers

Fugu Ultra v2 is the higher-performance model in Sakana AI's Fugu family. $5 per million input tokens, $30 per million output tokens. 1,000,000 token context window, maximum output of 128,000 tokens.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Fugu Max is live on Open Router! 🐡 Our learned multi-agent orchestration engine routes tasks across open-weights and specialized models for Pareto-frontier efficiency. • $2/$6 per 1M tokens • Multimodal (Image/PDF) + Web Search • Configurable reasoning & Function Call openrouter.ai/sakana/fugu-...

openrouter.ai

Fugu Max - API Pricing & Providers

Fugu Max is the cost-performance model in Sakana AI's Fugu family. $2 per million input tokens, $6 per million output tokens. 1,000,000 token context window, maximum output of 128,000 tokens.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

By orchestrating the world's models, we are building the resilient infrastructure required for AI sovereignty. Try: sakana.ai/fugu Blog: sakana.ai/fugu-max-rel... 🐡

sakana.ai

Sakana Fugu — Multi-agent System as A Model

One model to command them all

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power. An orchestration system routes around vendor restrictions by relying on an entirely swappable agent pool. I am incredibly proud of our team for shipping this.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Together, they show that orchestration does not force a choice between cost and performance. It advances both simultaneously. Relying on a single company's model for critical infrastructure is a massive risk. As recent export controls have shown, access can disappear overnight.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Fugu Max expands the Pareto frontier outward, orchestrating our largest pool of models to deliver frontier-grade results at a fraction of the token spend. Fugu Ultra v2 pushes that frontier upward, achieving peak performance without depending on the frontier models it competes against.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Evolution innovates under constraints. The future belongs to systems that know not just how to solve a problem, but which machinery to deploy for the lowest possible cost. Today we are releasing Fugu Max and Fugu Ultra v2.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Intelligence is a collective, distributed system. Humanity itself is a collective intelligence. We built Sakana Fugu on this conviction: the most powerful AI systems will not be isolated giants, but collaborative ecosystems that learn to coordinate. sakana.ai/fugu

sakana.ai

Sakana Fugu — Multi-agent System as A Model

One model to command them all

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Introducing Fugu Max and Fugu Ultra v2: Orchestrating the Pareto Frontier The AI industry has spent a decade optimizing along a single axis: build bigger, more expensive models. But intelligence has never been a monolith. Blog: sakana.ai/fugu-max-rel...

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Introducing Fugu Max and Fugu Ultra v2: the next evolution of Sakana Fugu’s multi-agent orchestration system. Try: sakana.ai/fugu Blog: sakana.ai/fugu-max-rel... The frontier that actually matters is the Pareto frontier: capability on one axis, cost on the other.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

People ask what Japan needs to be more innovative. More English? STEM? Daycare? Those are fine, but won’t move the needle. If I had a magic wand, I’d give the country a collective sense of hope. You can be dirt poor and still build. Hope creates change. Change creates more hope.

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Watching a popular coding tool lose frontier model access really shows why model resiliency matters. In the future, products will continue to work perfectly even if several underlying models go offline. They’ll just route around them.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

We're Hiring: Member of Technical Staff (LLM Development) 🐟 sakana.ai/careers/memb... The role: ・Developing LLMs that form the foundation of Sakana AI's products, solutions, RSI research ・Joining a team that covers every stage of LLM development, from pre-training to post-training and evaluation

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

unpopular opinion: gemini is a pretty great model most current baseline models are actually perfectly fine for 99% of everyday work. not everyone needs a state-of-the-art coding model to get things done.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

The next frontier of Recursive Self-Improvement is Physical AI. Japan sparked the robotics revolution. We’re expanding our RSI Lab to build world models that allow agentic reasoning systems to recursively self-improve their ability to simulate, plan, and act in the real world. Join us in Tokyo:

sakana.ai

Sakana AI

Member of Technical Staff (RSI Lab)

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

We just pushed a big update to Sakana Chat Free to use: chat.sakana.ai A big motivation for this release is getting people in Japan, especially kids, excited about software development. Vibe-coding turns Kanji & Math drills during the summer break into fun games they can actually build themselves.

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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Sakana Chat just got an upgrade. Powered by Fugu and Namazu, our Japanese LLM. With newly added code execution, you can vibe-code interactive web apps, games, and tools in seconds by describing them (even in Japanese). No login required, free to use: chat.sakana.ai 🐟

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

After rigorous testing, our joint AI project with Daiwa Securities is entering the full-scale production phase. We're bringing our agentic AI systems to Daiwa’s wealth management teams to accelerate complex market analysis in volatile markets. Big milestone for Sakana AI today!

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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Sakana Namazu: An LLM API with Japanese-vibes! 🎏 Built for Japanese enterprises, featuring frontier-level reasoning and built-in agentic tools. Blog post: sakana.ai/namazu-api#E...

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