
A paper he co-wrote changed artificial intelligence. In Tokyo, the Sakana AI co-founder is trying to protect the freedom that made such a paper possible - and see what comes after it.

A derivatives trader used points from his lunches to enter a library above the trading floor. The experiments he built there eventually took him to Google Brain and, years later, to a Tokyo AI company named for a school of fish.

He trained for law, spent years in diplomacy and helped take Mercari abroad. At Sakana AI, Ren Ito brings that habit of crossing borders to a new question: how should Japan build its own future in AI?