AI Inventors

Biography of Llion Jones

By Kamal Kashyap • Jul 04, 2026
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Llion Jones is a Welsh computer scientist who co-authored the Transformer paper at Google Brain and co-founded Sakana AI in Tokyo to design nature-inspired neural architectures.

Llion Jones is a Welsh computer scientist and AI researcher. He is best known as a co-creator of the Transformer architecture via the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" and as the co-founder of Sakana AI, an innovative artificial intelligence research laboratory based in Tokyo, Japan.

Google Brain Journey

Jones studied Computer Science at Del Mar College and earned his Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham. He joined Google in 2012, working as a software engineer before transitioning to Google Brain. He is credited with writing the initial codebase and naming the paper "Attention Is All You Need."

Founding Sakana AI

In 2023, Jones left Google after 11 years to co-found Sakana AI in Tokyo alongside David Ha. Sakana AI focuses on developing nature-inspired, evolutionary, and collective intelligence approaches to deep learning, moving away from rigid feedforward neural networks toward dynamic, self-organizing systems.

Llion Jones
Llion Jones
Llion Jones
Company Sakana AI (formerly Google Brain)
Country Wales / Japan
Notable work Co-author of "Attention Is All You Need", Transformer Architecture
Title AI Researcher & Co-founder of Sakana AI

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