tokyo
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Llion Jones Helped Invent the Transformer. Now He Wants Room to Think Beyond It.
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.
David Ha Followed a Lunch Card Into the Future of AI
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.
Ren Ito and the Art of Changing Course
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?
Ryo Chikazawa
Ryo Chikazawa is the co-founder and CEO of Autify, an AI-powered software testing automation company based in San Francisco and Tokyo. A software engineer who worked in Japan, Singapore, and the US, he kept running into the same problem everywhere: testing software takes too long. After eight pivots and interviewing 70+ prospects, he built Autify into a no-code test automation platform used by companies like Unity, DeNA, and ZOZO, raising roughly $32M through Series B and launching Autify Genesis, an autonomous AI testing agent.