Llion Jones

Llion Jones is a Welsh machine learning researcher, co-founder and CTO of Sakana AI. 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 a coauthor of "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] ↑ Thomas, Huw (2025-11-24). "AI pioneer Llion Jones calls for UK to 'be brave' in tech race". BBC. Retrieved 2026-05-26.