Silicon Valley’s next big AI idea is probably already sitting in a 1991 paper by Sakana AI’s new chief advisor. The Tokyo-based startup has hired Jürgen Schmidhuber, whom it calls the “father of modern AI,” as Chief Scientific Advisor. Sakana credits him with early work on world models in 1990 and with the 1991 deep learning techniques behind much of today’s AI boom. His 1987 thesis on meta-learning and recursive self-improvement, where AI keeps improving itself, started nearly four decades of research into how machines can learn to learn. Sakana says those ideas directly shaped its projects like the Darwin Gödel Machine and The AI Scientist.

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. 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.

Jürgen Schmidhuber

Schmidhuber will help steer Sakana’s new RSI lab, which aims to build a self-reinforcing research loop that makes machines smarter. To do that, Sakana wants to gather a “critical mass of world-class experts” in Tokyo, it says.