NTT DOCOMO Ventures Invests in Sakana AI Ltd., a Company Aiming to Develop Next-Generation Generative AI Infrastructure Models

　NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Jun Yasumoto; hereinafter, “NDV”) is pleased to announce that, through a fund that it manages, it has invested in Sakana AI Ltd. (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO: David Ha, hereinafter, “Sakana AI”), a company aiming to develop next-generation generative AI infrastructure models.

　Sakana AI is an AI research and development startup founded in Tokyo in August 2023 by David Ha, who has led research on complex and autonomous systems as head of Google Brain’s Japan division, and Llion Jones, one of the authors of “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper that proposed the “transformer” model that has led to the current explosion in generative AI.

　Sakana AI has now completed its first round of fundraising, raising approximately 4.5 billion yen from Japanese and U.S. venture capital and other sources, making it one of the largest first rounds ever raised by a Japanese startup*1. NTT Group, through NDV, has now become the largest shareholder in the company from Japan.

　In order to solve the enormous power consumption issues that current large language models face, Nippon Telegraph And Telephone Corporation (hereinafter, “NTT”), is currently developing “tsuzumi*2,” a large language model that is lightweight yet boasts world-class Japanese language processing performance.
Furthermore, as announced in November 2023*3, NTT and Sakana AI are collaborating on ”AI constellation” research to realize a sustainable generative AI society. By efficiently linking a large number of small AIs, the two companies will not only promote power savings for single AI models, such as large-scale language models, but also for the architectural structure itself.
With this investment, we aim to further enhance our collaboration in AI constellation research and create new knowledge and value to solve complex social issues.

■Sakana AI Profile
Name: Sakana AI Ltd.
Head Office: Toranomon Hills Business Tower (in CIC Tokyo), 1-17-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Representative: David Ha, CEO
Areas of Business: Research and development of new AI architecture and models that are autonomous and place less of a burden on the environment
Website: https://sakana.ai/

*1: According to a Sakana AI investigation by initial and CrunchBase
*2 tsuzumi, NTT’s Large Language Model
https://www.rd.ntt/research/LLM_tsuzumi.html
*3: NTT press release “NTT and Sakana AI sign a collaboration agreement for the R&D of AI constellations that will enable a society in which sustainable generative AI is used” (in Japanese)
https://group.ntt/jp/newsrelease/2023/11/13/pdf/231113ba.pdf