Meet the Guy Building AI Like a School of Fish 🐟

David Ha came from a deep research background — machine learning, generative models, exploring how neural networks learn and create — spending years at the frontier of AI research, including stints at Google Brain and Stability AI. One pattern kept repeating everywhere he looked.

The industry was racing toward bigger models. More parameters, more compute, more data, bigger and bigger, over and over. David started thinking about a different possibility entirely: what if intelligence could emerge from combining many smaller ideas, rather than one single system scaling endlessly upward? What if AI systems could evolve, experiment, adapt, and combine, instead of leaning entirely on brute force scaling?

That thinking eventually led him to co-found Sakana AI with Llion Jones, a Tokyo-based AI research lab (the name choice here is honestly kind of poetic lol). Sakana means "fish" in Japanese, inspired by schools of fish moving together as a collective — and that idea shaped the entire approach to the company.

Sakana AI explores evolutionary algorithms, model collaboration, nature-inspired intelligence, and systems that combine and adapt existing models. The goal centers on discovering entirely new ways of creating intelligence, rather than making the same architecture grow larger indefinitely. 🐠

A few things he saw that others missed:

Bigger isn't always better
When an entire industry follows one direction, alternative approaches can create enormous opportunities.
Evolution can become an engineering strategy
Combining existing systems can sometimes produce capabilities difficult to achieve from scratch.
Research creates optionality
The most valuable breakthroughs often begin as ideas that challenge today's assumptions.

The takeaway:
Don't blindly follow the current race. Question the architecture, challenge the assumptions, and look for completely different ways to solve the problem. The biggest opportunity may be hiding in the direction everyone else ignored — that's how new technologies get born.

What's an industry "assumption" you think is quietly due for a rethink?

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