Sakana AI hires Jürgen Schmidhuber as Chief Scientific Advisor

Tokyo-based Sakana AI has hired Jürgen Schmidhuber as Chief Scientific Advisor. The company calls him the “father of modern AI” and credits his earlier work with influencing deep learning, world models, meta-learning, and recursive self-improvement.

The move places Schmidhuber in a formal advisory role as Sakana expands work around AI systems that can improve themselves over time.

Sakana says Schmidhuber’s ideas helped shape projects including the Darwin Gödel Machine and The AI Scientist. Its new RSI Lab is focused on recursive self-improvement, described in the provided material as AI that keeps developing itself.

For readers tracking AI research, the key takeaway is that Sakana is tying its current product and research direction to long-running academic ideas about machines that learn how to learn.

Schmidhuber framed the opportunity around Japan’s history in neural network architectures and robotics, saying the future of intelligence is “not just language” but “physical AI powered by world models.”

That points to a research direction beyond chat interfaces: autonomous systems that can understand, simulate, and interact with the physical universe, according to the statement included in the article.

Sakana says it wants to gather a “critical mass of world-class experts” in Tokyo for the RSI Lab. The practical question is whether the lab can turn recursive self-improvement from a research ambition into reliable systems and measurable progress.

For AI teams and observers, the hiring is a signal to watch Sakana’s work on world models, self-improving research loops, and autonomous AI systems closely.