David Ha
Co-founder and CEO of Sakana AI; former Google research scientist and co-author of World Models
- Co-Founder & CEO, Sakana AI1
David Ha is the co-founder and CEO of Sakana AI, which Ha founded in 2023 with Llion Jones and Ren Ito and whose work includes The AI Scientist and the Darwin Gödel Machine. Ha was previously a research scientist at Google, where Ha led a Google Brain research team, and Ha's research focuses on complex self-organizing systems and the self-evolution of AI. Ha co-authored "World Models" (2018) with Jürgen Schmidhuber, wrote the sketch-rnn paper with Douglas Eck, and is a co-author of "The AI Scientist" (2024).1234
Work
World Models (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First author, with Jürgen Schmidhuber, of the 2018 paper on generative world models of reinforcement learning environments, in which an agent can be trained inside its own world model and transferred back to the real environment.2
sketch-rnn (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First author, with Douglas Eck, of "A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings" (2017), which presents sketch-rnn, a recurrent neural network that constructs stroke-based drawings.3
The AI Scientist (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
Co-author of "The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery" (2024), a framework in which language models generate research ideas, run experiments and write papers.4
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
- Research Scientist; led a Google Brain research team, Google (Google Brain)1
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