Llion Jones

Llion Jones is a Welsh computer scientist and AI entrepreneur who helped develop the Transformer architecture. He studied computer science at the University of Birmingham, completing postgraduate work before beginning a career in software and machine learning. His path into AI included engineering work at Google and collaboration with researchers working on neural models.

Jones was one of the eight authors of Attention Is All You Need, published in 2017. The paper introduced an architecture that used attention to model relationships within sequences. Its influence spread through language research and other areas, supported by many subsequent contributions in training methods, data, and computing infrastructure.

In 2023, Jones co-founded Sakana AI with David Ha and Ren Ito in Tokyo. He serves as its chief technology officer. The company investigates approaches inspired by evolution and collective intelligence, including methods for combining models and automating parts of the research process. Its work reflects an interest in developing alternatives to simply increasing the size of a single model.

Jones's career joins an influential collaborative research contribution with the practical work of building a new laboratory. At Sakana AI, that includes choosing research directions and translating experiments into usable systems. His contribution is especially relevant to the question of how AI development might benefit from diverse models, adaptive processes, and different ways of organizing computational resources.