Sakana AI's Takuya Akiba and CADDi's Yoshihiro Fukuhara on How to Compete Globally in AI Research
tkasasagi · x · 2026-09-18
A long-form conversation between Sakana AI research lead Takuya Akiba (Optuna creator, ex-Preferred Networks and Stability AI) and CADDi research lead Yoshihiro Fukuhara on why they insist on competing at a global level.
- Akiba's origin: competitive programming; in mid-2000s Japan wasn't top-tier, so he mined Chinese forums via rough machine translation for cutting-edge knowledge, later experiencing the intensity of China's top students during internships at MSR Asia.
- Fukuhara's origin: a UCLA summer program targeting top Peking/Tsinghua students (the only Japanese admit) showed him the heat of the global baseline firsthand.
- Work ethic: Fukuhara reads 600 papers in 4 months and earned 12 AWS certifications in 2 months, applying AI's learning rule to humans—"bigger dataset is better"—via immersive, no-escape sprint sessions.
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