Research into agent-native world models and physical AI will now center around a new facility in Tokyo. The project, known as the RSI Lab, will be guided by Jürgen Schmidhuber in his new role as Chief Scientific Advisor at Sakana AI to trigger a compounding cycle of scientific discovery aimed at improving machine intelligence.

Schmidhuber, often called the father of modern AI, pioneered meta-learning and established early frameworks for world models in the 1990s. His research on recursive self-improvement and machines that learn to learn provided the conceptual foundation for Sakana AI's Darwin Gödel Machine and The AI Scientist.