Sakana AI to at least double engineers, David Ha says

Sakana AI's identity is built on a metaphor from the picture book Swimmy: intelligence as a school of fish rather than a single fish. That idea carries into how the company describes its own organization, with the Research, Applied and Product teams said to run as one cycle "like three fish," and into its product strategy, where research outputs such as Fugu and Namazu are deployed by the Product team and used by the Applied team. The Open House itself reflected a widening surface area: last year's event was limited to Applied Research Engineers, while this year's covered five roles, including Forward Deployed Engineer and Cybersecurity Engineer. The company says its applied work has concentrated on decision support — mid-term management planning, macro analysis, M&A proposals and advanced credit judgment — rather than operations tasks like meeting minutes, and that this work has begun spreading beyond finance into cybersecurity and manufacturing.