Sakana AI Announces Sawara Language Model at Tokyo Symposium
A from-scratch Japanese LLM effort is notable because nearly all frontier models now trace back to a handful of US and Chinese labs, and Sakana argues the next openings lie outside them. Teams tracking model ecosystem diversity, or researchers interested in Japan's AI ambitions, should watch the spring 2027 release and the event videos for technical direction.
Sakana AI hosted the symposium "From World Models to Real-World AI" at Hitotsubashi Hall in Tokyo on 26 October, drawing more than 400 attendees. Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber, who became Sakana's Chief Scientific Advisor in September, delivered a keynote tracing AI history back to his 1990 work on world models. Chief Scientist Takuya Akiba introduced "Sakana Sawara" (provisional name), a new language model series built from scratch with full pre-training. The first model, "Sawara Small" (provisional name), is slated for release in spring 2027.
Sakana AI Symposium: Building the Future of Language Models, World Models, and Physical AI from Japan
Event Report (English): https://t.co/dW29YYm0bv
On October 26, we hosted the symposium “From World Models to Real-World AI” at Hitotsubashi Hall in Tokyo. More than 400 people joined us for a keynote by Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber (@SchmidhuberAI), who became our Chief Scientific Advisor in September, and a conversation with our CEO David Ha, his co-author on the 2018 paper “World Models.”
In his keynote, Jürgen traced the path to today’s AI through the work of researchers around the world, including Shun-ichi Amari and Kunihiko Fukushima in Japan, as well as his own 1990 work on world models and artificial curiosity.
Our Chief Scientist Takuya Akiba also introduced “Sakana Sawara” (provisional name), a new language model series we are building from scratch, starting with pre-training. If everything goes smoothly, the first model, a small model called “Sawara Small” (provisional name), will be released in spring 2027.
Perhaps half of the AI Jürgen has envisioned has been realized through generative AI. The other half, artificial scientists that design their own experiments and physical AI that works in the real world, has yet to scale. We believe that opportunity lies especially outside the big labs, and that Japan is one of the most promising places to pursue it. We hope this symposium becomes a starting point for shaping the next era of AI in Japan, together with companies and research institutions across the country.
Videos will be added later. A big thank you to everyone who joined us! 🐟
