creators

Llion Jones - Sakana AI CTO, Transformer co-author

Llion Jones co-wrote 'Attention Is All You Need' at Google and co-founded Sakana AI in Tokyo in July 2023, where he is chief technology officer.

Llion Jones is a Welsh machine-learning researcher, born in 1984 in Bangor, who lives in Tokyo. He read artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Birmingham and took a master's there, joined Google in 2011, moved to Google Research in 2015 and left Google Japan in 2023. He was one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), which introduced the Transformer. He suggested the paper's title, a nod to the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love"; the name Transformer itself was Jakob Uszkoreit's choice, according to a 2024 New Yorker account. In July 2023 he co-founded Sakana AI in Tokyo with David Ha and Ren Ito and is its chief technology officer; the firm looks for model designs drawn from collective behaviour in nature rather than from scale alone. He has argued publicly against the field narrowing around one architecture, telling a TEDAI San Francisco audience in October 2025, in a talk TED published on 28 January 2026, that competition between labs is holding back the next breakthrough.

Specialization

transformer architectures, natural language processing, nature-inspired model design

Country

Japan