Sakana AI names Jürgen Schmidhuber Chief Scientific Advisor

Sakana AI's decision to bring in Jürgen Schmidhuber ties the Tokyo startup's ambitions to research threads that date back decades. The company points to his 1990 work on world models and his 1991 deep learning techniques as foundations for much of today's AI boom, and says his 1987 thesis on meta-learning and recursive self-improvement started nearly four decades of research into how machines can learn to learn. Sakana says those ideas directly shaped its own projects, including the Darwin Gödel Machine and The AI Scientist.

In a statement, Schmidhuber framed the move around Japan's history in neural network architectures and robotics. He called it a privilege to join Sakana AI to help bridge those two worlds, and argued that the future of intelligence is not just language but physical AI powered by world models. He added that 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.

The new RSI lab is where those ideas are meant to take practical form. Sakana describes it as aiming to build a self-reinforcing research loop that makes machines smarter, and says it wants to gather a "critical mass of world-class experts" in Tokyo to pursue that goal. What that lab produces, and how quickly it can draw such a group to Tokyo, is likely to shape how the hire translates into results for the startup.