creators

David Ha — co-founder and CEO of Sakana AI

David Ha runs Sakana AI in Tokyo, which he co-founded in 2023. He co-wrote the World Models paper and led Google Brain's Tokyo team before that.

David Ha is a Canadian machine-learning researcher and the co-founder and CEO of Sakana AI in Tokyo. He took an honours BSc in engineering science and a master's in mathematical finance at the University of Toronto, and a PhD at the University of Tokyo. He worked in banking first as a derivatives trader, becoming a managing director at Goldman Sachs in Japan. He then spent about six years as a researcher at Google, helping start and lead Google Brain's team in Tokyo. In March 2018 he and Jürgen Schmidhuber published "World Models", which had reinforcement-learning agents train inside a generative model of their environment. He left Google for Stability AI in 2022 and left Stability in June 2023. With Llion Jones and Ren Ito he founded Sakana AI in July 2023 to build models on ideas from nature — evolution and collective intelligence. The company announced a $30 million seed round led by Lux Capital in January 2024 and a Series B of ¥32 billion, about $200 million, in November 2025, at a post-money valuation of roughly ¥432 billion. TIME named Ha to its 2025 list of the hundred most influential people in AI, citing Sakana's AI Scientist system.

Specialization

generative models, evolutionary computation, collective intelligence, reinforcement learning

Country

Japan