Im Daniel Im

We’re excited to introduce KAME: Tandem Architecture for Enhancing Knowledge in Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Conversational AI, accepted at #ICASSP2026! 🐢 Blog pub.sakana.ai/kame/ Paper arxiv.org/abs/2510.02327 Can a speech AI think deeply without pausing to process? In real conversation, we don’t wait until we’ve fully worked out what we want to say—we start talking, and our thoughts catch up as the sentence unfolds. Fast speech-to-speech models achieve this, but their reasoning tends to stay shallow. Cascaded pipelines that route through a knowledgeable LLM are smarter, but the added latency breaks the flow—they fall back to "think, then speak." In our new paper, we propose a way to break this trade-off. We call it KAME (Turtle in Japanese). A speech-to-speech model handles the fast response loop and starts replying immediately. In parallel, a backend LLM runs asynchronously, generating response candidates that are continuously injected as "oracle" signals in real time. This shifts the AI paradigm from "think, then speak" to "speak while thinking." The backend LLM is completely swappable. You can plug in GPT-4.1, Claude Opus, or Gemini 2.5 Flash depending on the task without changing the frontend. In our experiments, Claude tended to score higher on reasoning, while GPT did better on humanities questions. Try the model yourself here: huggingface.co/SakanaAI/kame

What if instead of building one giant AI, we evolved a coordinator to orchestrate a diverse team of specialized AIs? 🐟 Excited to share our new paper: “TRINITY: An Evolved LLM Coordinator”, published as a conference paper at #ICLR2026! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.04695 In nature, complex problems are rarely solved by a single monolithic entity, but rather by the coordinated efforts of specialized individuals working together. Yet, modern AI development is heavily focused on endlessly scaling up single, massive monolithic models, yielding diminishing returns. While model merging offers a way to combine different skills, it is often impractical due to mismatched neural architectures and the closed-source nature of top-performing models. To address this, we took a macro-level approach: test-time model composition. We introduce TRINITY, a system that fuses the complementary strengths of diverse, state-of-the-art models without needing to modify their underlying weights. TRINITY processes queries over multiple turns. At each step, a lightweight coordinator assigns one of three distinct roles to an LLM from its available pool: 1/ Thinker: Devises high-level strategies and analyzes the current state. 2/ Worker: Executes concrete problem-solving steps. 3/ Verifier: Evaluates if the current solution is complete and correct. By dynamically assigning these roles, the coordinator effectively offloads complex reasoning and skill execution onto the external models. What makes TRINITY unique is its extreme efficiency. The coordinator relies on the hidden states of a compact language model and a small routing head. In total, it has fewer than 20K learnable parameters. Training this system presented a massive challenge. Traditional Reinforcement Learning (REINFORCE) failed because the gradients had a low signal-to-noise ratio due to binary rewards and weak parameter coupling. Imitation learning (Supervised Fine-Tuning) was ruled out because generating multi-turn labels is prohibitively expensive. Our solution? We turned to nature-inspired algorithms. We optimized the coordinator using a derivative-free evolutionary algorithm. We found that evolution is uniquely suited to optimize this tight, high-dimensional coordination problem where traditional gradient-based methods fail. The results are very promising. In our experiments, TRINITY consistently outperforms existing multi-agent methods and individual models across various benchmarks. At the time of publication, it set a new state-of-the-art record on LiveCodeBench, achieving an 86.2% pass@1 score. More importantly, it demonstrated incredible generalization. Without any retraining, TRINITY transferred zero-shot to four unseen tasks (AIME, BigCodeBench, MT-Bench, and GPQA). On average, the evolved coordinator surpassed every individual constituent model in its pool, including GPT-5, Gemini 2.5-Pro, and Claude-4-Sonnet (the top frontier models available at the time of our #ICLR2026 submission last year). This work is central to Sakana AI's vision. We believe the future of AI isn't just about scaling monolithic models, but engineering collaborative, diverse AI ecosystems that can adapt and combine their strengths. We invite the community to read the paper and explore these ideas! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.04695 OpenReview: openreview.net/forum?id=5HaRj… This foundational research is part of the core engine powering our multi-agent product: Sakana Fugu 🐡👇