[Event Report] Sakana AI Symposium: Jürgen Schmidhuber on the Past and Future of AI, and Language Models, World Models, and Physical AI from Japan

On October 26, 2026, Sakana AI held a symposium at Hitotsubashi Hall in Tokyo featuring a keynote by Chief Scientific Advisor Jürgen Schmidhuber and a conversation with CEO David Ha, drawing over 400 attendees from across Japan. Sakana AI announced it is moving into pre-training its own models, unveiling the "Sakana Sawara" (provisional name) language model series, with the small first model "Sawara Small" (provisional name) planned for release in spring 2027 if development proceeds smoothly. The report presents edited transcripts of the talks, including Takuya Akiba on LLM development at the RSI Lab, Robert Tjarko Lange on open-ended autonomous discovery systems, and Stefania Druga and Sebastian Risi on world models and Physical AI.