David Ha is a computer scientist, machine learning researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Sakana AI, an innovative AI startup based in Tokyo that designs collective and nature-inspired neural architectures.
Google Brain and World Models
Ha spent several years as a research scientist at Google Brain, where he led the research team in Tokyo. During his time at Google, he co-authored the influential paper "World Models" (2018) with Jürgen Schmidhuber, demonstrating how an agent can learn to perform tasks by training entirely within its own simulated dream-like environment. He is also known for creating SketchRNN, a model that generates vector drawings.
Stability AI and Sakana AI
In 2022, Ha joined Stability AI as Head of Research, helping direct open-source generative modeling. In 2023, he joined forces with Welsh researcher Llion Jones to co-found Sakana AI in Tokyo, focusing on self-organizing intelligence and evolutionary computation to move past massive static neural networks.
