Llion Jones

Overview

Llion Jones is an artificial intelligence researcher and technology executive. He is one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", a paper submitted to arXiv on 12 June 2017 ^[1]. He is also a co-founder and chief technology officer of Sakana AI, a company whose own company page gives July 2023 as its founding date ^[3].

Education

Jones studied at the University of Birmingham. The university's page on him says he completed a BSc in Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science and then an MSc in Advanced Computer Science ^[2]. The order of the two degrees — a first degree that joins two subjects, followed by a master's in more advanced computer science — is a common route into AI research. Undergraduate years are mostly spent on programming, mathematics and the fundamentals of the field; a master's year is often where a student first works closely on research-level problems and decides whether to continue in research.

The 2017 paper

Jones's name appears among the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", submitted to arXiv on 12 June 2017 ^[1]. The title is itself an argument. Attention is a mechanism inside neural networks that lets a model give different weights to different parts of its input when it produces each output, instead of treating every input element as equally important. A translation model, for instance, can look back at the particular words of a source sentence that matter for the word it is about to produce, rather than relying on a single fixed summary of the whole sentence. Saying that attention is "all you need" claims that this one mechanism, arranged in the right way, is enough by itself. Jones is one of eight people listed on that preprint ^[1].

Founding Sakana AI

In the account he gives on the University of Birmingham page, Jones left Google Research in order to start Sakana AI ^[2]. Sakana AI's company page dates the company's founding to July 2023 and lists him as Co-Founder & CTO ^[3]. The same page names the other co-founders: David Ha as Co-Founder & CEO, and Ren Ito as Co-Founder & Chairman ^[3].

This division of roles is the usual one for a young technology company. The chief executive runs the business and its organisation, the chairman presides over the board, and the chief technology officer is responsible for the technical direction of what the company builds. For a researcher, moving from a research position at an established lab into a founding role changes the shape of the work: alongside research questions there are now questions about what to build, whom to hire and how the organisation is run. The Birmingham page records the move as his own description of why he left Google Research ^[2], and the company page records the formal roles from the company's side ^[3].

Continuing to publish

Jones has continued to write research papers after founding the company. He is a co-author of "Continuous Thought Machines", written with Luke Darlow, Ciaran Regan, Sebastian Risi and Jeffrey Seely, and submitted to arXiv on 8 May 2025 ^[4]. As with the 2017 paper, the work appears first as an arXiv preprint, the format in which much machine-learning research is circulated and read before, or instead of, formal journal publication.

Place in the field

Jones's public record describes a fairly short and specific path: a first degree and a master's in computer science and AI ^[2], a place among the eight authors of a 2017 arXiv paper on attention ^[1], a departure from Google Research to start a company ^[2], a co-founder and CTO role at a company founded in July 2023 ^[3], and continued co-authorship of arXiv preprints in 2025 ^[4]. Read together, the entries describe someone who moved from writing a widely read research paper to building and running an organisation, while still appearing as a co-author on new work.