Indeed. The world models research many labs are now chasing was to some degree ignited by David Ha and Schmidhuber's 2018 paper.

More broadly, Sakana is pursing a refreshingly distinct research path, with their focus on evolutionary methods, biological intelligence (e.g. continuous thought machines) and open publication.

so he's the quintessential brilliant jerk, ok

Kind of shocking - a model comes out that beats mythos and offers a reasonable price and it ... gets downvoted?

Probably taking hate from both sides - OpenAI / Claude fans who are undercutting its moat. Chinese open-model fans that want it to be cheaper.

But it's a genuine accomplishment to hit those benchmarks and offer a reasonable plan?

Bizarre reaction TBH.