Sakana AI, a Japanese artificial intelligence unicorn, has announced that it is developing its first mobile application, tentatively named "Sakana AI App," and is currently recruiting beta testers. CEO David Ha stated that the app represents a new direction for the company's development. Headquartered in Tokyo, Sakana AI was co-founded by David Ha, a former research scientist at Google; Ren Ito, a former executive at Stability AI; and Llion Jones, co-author of the seminal Transformer architecture paper "Attention Is All You Need." The company focuses on AI inspired by natural principles, employing an "evolutionary model merging" technique that mimics natural selection mechanisms to process language and image data, thereby reducing computational costs and enhancing model performance. In less than a year since its founding, Sakana AI has become Japan's fastest-growing AI unicorn, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion as of 2024.