David Ha, CEO and co-founder, was one of the youngest managing director at Goldman Sachs before doing ML at Google. His ML publications were considered top-notch almost a decade ago. I had high hopes for him when he raised money and founded Sakana.
I do agree with some comments here that perhaps this particular product is not well thought out. I also agree with the criticism that David calls Sakana a frontier AI lab while making money just selling AI B2B applications to Japanese businesses. I also agree with the assessment that Sakana has abrasive and antagonistic, sometimes openly hostile, recruiting tactics. I also agree that his then-impressive publications may have lost their luster in the age of LLMs.
However, the man is clearly driven; and he and his team may have more to offer in future. I admire the man for not taking the conventional AI-research career path.
More broadly, Sakana is pursing a refreshingly distinct research path, with their focus on evolutionary methods, biological intelligence (e.g. continuous thought machines) and open publication.
Probably taking hate from both sides - OpenAI / Claude fans who are undercutting its moat. Chinese open-model fans that want it to be cheaper.
But it's a genuine accomplishment to hit those benchmarks and offer a reasonable plan?
Bizarre reaction TBH.
[0] https://dev.classmethod.jp/en/articles/sakana-fugu-ga-first-...
Also, from the technical report, looks like they're training on the output of Claude Code, etc. I'm guessing this doesn't violate TOS because they're technically not a directly competing model. This brings me to what I see as the main risk with this service, which is that it seems like an easy thing for a frontier lab to make obsolete, either by models beginning to converge in terms of strengths or by improving their own harnesses to include more of this meta-reasoning.
We talk in detail about Fugu and why these kind of routing models are likely to win out over the big frontier models.
He makes some very good arguments for them.
https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-future-of-ai-looks-very-...
All put together, paying ~$60 to get a hit-or-miss report seems a bit excessive, but obviously as the models they use under the hood get better it becomes more and more worth it, assuming they also improve their grounding/search capabilities.
I'm a big fan of Sakana though, and have followed David Ha / @hardmaru since the world models papers (with the racing car game and the Doom clone), which were incredible at the time.
While you're at it, feel free to send me $200 as well, I'll generate a crypto address ending with "AI".
$20/month: Claude Code
$10/month: Minimax
$16/month: Xiaomi Mimo
$10/month: Opencode Go
(don't send anything, sharing only because of the base58 fun fact I didn't know)
Omitting those characters makes it good for generating passwords if they need to be typed in by hand.
Double-clicking a base58 string always selects the whole string and it doesn't wrap accidentally, thanks to missing / and +, so it's also convenient to copy and paste.
The major two deals it was purposed to are still up on the air , if we win sure , 60x win
These prices are just going to get raced to $0.
Guess what, the big players are hoarding all the RAM and GPUs so that other people can't afford decent hardware. It's working out beautifully for them!
It's $200/month. You have to take into account energy costs and all the rest of a system, but if you break even within 1-2 years ($2400-$4800) it'd be a pretty good deal. And $4000 buys you a pretty decent system.
But it's a hefty upfront investment for people who just want to experiment. The good thing about $200/month subscriptions is that you can cancel them any time and cut your losses. Not so with a $4000 computer that loses half of its resale value as soon as you plug it in.
I think the current sweet spot for people who don't already own a high-end gaming PC is to rent a server with a beefy GPU from Hetzner et al. and run local models there.
It's similar to how AirPods normalised all of us having $300+ headphones. All of us would have scoffed at the idea a decade ago.
They are talking about a much larger group of people.
Would you want to use a text editor that updates the screen very slowly? Kind of the same thing for using agentic systems as coding assistants: don’t want a ‘sluggish’ experience.
But your aunt Josie didn't have one. Now Apple is selling 80 million units / year and the ~$300 price tag has become normal. Before that, most people had headphones that were 10 times cheaper.
I just averaged it out.
I've been shipping production on archive.tw with Fugu Ultra in /advisor on oh-my-pi.
Advisor doesn’t slow the loop if the driver stays fast. Worth it if your harness can split advisor from worker.
Edit: nevermind, but which plugin or so?
This gets you that in a nice neat package, without the underlying tinkering mechanics.
If (big iff) the usage mechanics work out, then this is actually a really good anti-big-model strategy.
They'll be incentivized for your success, not token-maximizing for their investors.
The team is super smart too. What's not to like?
Wishing them the best on launch.
But their paid plans I'm not sure yet - planning to subscribe and can let you know.
Almost no chance it will be as generous as OpenAI though. They just don't have the money :-)
Does multiple vendors run this "single API" or how is this not replacing a single-vendor dependency for another single-vendor dependency?
it's interesting that they're offering in the form of fixed cost subscription plans too. My impression was that the first party providers can do this because they api inference margins to the tune of 80ish percent. Anyone else orchestrating on top of these models have to pass through these costs or eat it themselves.