[News Inside Companies] AI Developed to Write Papers for $15... Became a Unicorn Company

The era of artificial intelligence (AI) leading science has begun. Following this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was also awarded to experts in the AI field. The Nobel laureates in Physics developed AI algorithms. The Chemistry laureates used algorithms to predict and design protein structures.

Photo by SakanaAI

AI that conducts the entire scientific research process, from hypothesis setting to paper writing, is also emerging. Japanese startup Sakana AI launched a solution in August that enables AI to directly conduct scientific research using a large language model (LLM). It is called the 'AI Scientist.' The AI Scientist automates the entire scientific research process, from idea generation to experiments, results, paper writing, and review.

The cost of a paper written by the AI Scientist is about $15. When a paper request is received, the AI Scientist first begins brainstorming (presenting multiple ideas on a single problem) about the research direction. At the same time, it searches academic literature to ensure that the ideas generated during brainstorming do not overlap with existing research. It conducts the proposed experiments, visualizes the results, collects the necessary data, and writes the paper.

Notably, the AI Scientist has an automatic reviewer capable of reviewing and evaluating papers. The reviewer critiques the content of the generated paper and provides feedback to improve the research results. The industry expects this solution to enhance productivity and strengthen the competitiveness of AI research in Japan.

The company that developed the AI Scientist is Sakana AI. Sakana AI was co-founded last August by Ryan Jones and David Haga, both former Google employees. Jones is one of the authors of the paper "Attention is all you need," which first introduced the Transformer AI algorithm used to create generative AI. Global companies and notable figures such as Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures from the U.S., NTT, KDDI, and Sony from Japan, as well as Jeff Dean from Google and Cl?ment Delangue from Hugging Face, have invested in the company. Sakana AI became a unicorn company in less than a year since its founding. A unicorn is a startup less than 10 years old with a corporate valuation exceeding $1 billion. South Korea does not yet have an AI unicorn company.