Sakana AI Appoints AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber as Chief Scientific Advisor
Tokyo-based Sakana AI has hired deep learning pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber to guide its new recursive self-improvement lab and drive physical AI research.
Jürgen Schmidhuber Joins Sakana AI as Chief Scientific Advisor
Tokyo-based startup Sakana AI has recruited veteran computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber as its Chief Scientific Advisor. Schmidhuber, frequently cited by the startup as the "father of modern AI," steps into the advisory role to help guide Sakana's frontier research initiatives in Japan.
Steering the New RSI Lab and Autonomous Research
In his new role, Schmidhuber will help steer Sakana's newly established Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) lab. The facility focuses on engineering a self-reinforcing research feedback loop intended to enable machines to systematically enhance their own intelligence. To build out the lab, Sakana aims to assemble what it describes as a "critical mass of world-class experts" in Tokyo.
Sakana noted that Schmidhuber's theoretical foundations have directly underpinned several of the company's core initiatives, including The AI Scientist and the Darwin Gödel Machine. The startup points to nearly four decades of his foundational work: his 1987 thesis introduced concepts of meta-learning and machines that learn how to learn, followed by early frameworks for world models in 1990 and foundational deep learning techniques published in 1991 that power contemporary AI architectures.
Pushing Beyond Language to Physical AI
Schmidhuber's appointment aligns with Sakana's broader mission to expand AI beyond generative text into systems capable of operating in the real world. Schmidhuber emphasized Japan's dual strengths in early computing architectures and hardware engineering as pivotal to this direction.
"Japan is the birthplace of foundational neural network architectures and advanced robotics. It is a privilege to join Sakana AI to help bridge these two worlds," Schmidhuber said. "The future of intelligence is not just language; it is physical AI powered by world models. Sakana AI is uniquely positioned to reclaim Japan’s legacy of innovation by building autonomous systems that can truly understand, simulate, and interact with the physical universe."
