Biography:Llion Jones

From HandWiki
Llion Jones
Born
Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales
EducationUniversity of Birmingham (BSc, MSc)
OccupationMachine learning researcher
EmployerSakana AI

Llion Jones is a Welsh machine learning researcher, co-founder and CTO of Sakana AI.

Biography

Jones was born 1984 in Bangor, raised in Bangor and Abergynolwyn in Gwynedd, Wales.[1][2] He attended Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor,[1] then received a bachelors in artificial intelligence and computer science and masters in advanced computer science from the University of Birmingham.[3][4] Jones graduated in 2009,[1] joining Google's YouTube as a software engineer in 2011 or 2012, then moving to research in machine intelligence and natural language processing at Google Research in 2015.[4][5] Jones was the fifth coauthor of the paper "Attention is All You Need", a 2017 paper which introduced the transformer.[6]

In 2023, Llion left Google Japan to found the startup Sakana AI along with former Google employee and Stability AI officer David Ha, becoming its chief technology officer,[7][8] also joined by Ren Ito.[9]

Jones has criticized the narrow scope of AI research,[10][11] such as Google's limited focus on large language models.[4]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Evans, Arron (2018-11-16). "Bangor-born Llion opens up about journey to America as Google employee" (in en). https://www.northwaleschronicle.co.uk/news/17228897.bangor-born-llion-opens-journey-america-google-employee/. 
  2. ↑ Thomas, Huw (2025-11-24). "AI pioneer Llion Jones calls for UK to 'be brave' in tech race" (in en-GB). https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7e7mj0jmro. 
  3. ↑ "Llion Jones, Alumni" (in en). https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/study/student-experience/meet-our-students/llion-jones. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Novet, Jordan (2023-08-17). "Google A.I. researcher says he left to build a startup after encountering 'big company-itis'" (in en). https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/17/transformer-co-author-llion-jones-leaves-google-for-startup-sakana-ai.html. 
  5. ↑ "Llion Jones" (in en-US). https://dldnews.com/speakers/llion-jones/. 
  6. ↑ Tong, Anna (2023-08-17). "Top ex-Google Brain researchers start AI research company in Tokyo" (in en-US). Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/top-ex-google-brain-researchers-start-ai-research-company-tokyo-2023-08-17/. 
  7. ↑ Love, Julia (2023-07-10). "AI Researcher Who Helped Write Landmark Paper Is Leaving Google" (in en). Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-11/ai-researcher-who-helped-write-landmark-paper-is-leaving-google. 
  8. ↑ Forster, Katie (2025-09-10). "Top Japan startup Sakana AI touts nature-inspired tech" (in en). https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/09/10/companies/sakana-ai-interview/. 
  9. ↑ Ryuichi, Maruyama (2025-03-07). "[Special Feature: The Future of AI in Japan: Can Tokyo be a global hub for AI development? Interview with Ren Ito, co-founder of fast-rising Sakana AI"] (in en). https://sj.jst.go.jp/stories/2025/s0306-02p.html. 
  10. ↑ "Sakana AI's CTO says he's 'absolutely sick' of transformers, the tech that powers every major AI model" (in en-US). Venturebeat. 2025-10-23. https://venturebeat.com/technology/sakana-ais-cto-says-hes-absolutely-sick-of-transformers-the-tech-that-powers. 
  11. ↑ Jones, Llion (2026-01-28). How competition is stifling AI breakthroughs. Retrieved 2026-05-26 – via www.ted.com.



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