PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Llion Jones

Llion Jones is an AI researcher whose co-authorship of Attention Is All You Need introduced the Transformer architecture. He studied artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Birmingham before joining Google as a software engineer in 2011 and moving to Google Research in 2015. The Transformer paper followed in 2017; he moved to Google Japan in 2020 and co-founded Sakana AI in Tokyo in 2023. In 2026, he received an honorary degree from Birmingham and questioned whether scaling Transformers could take AI to AGI. As of October 2026, he is Sakana AI's co-founder and CTO.

Now at
Sakana AI
Works
31

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Photo of Llion Jones

Timeline

  1. Before 2011

    Studying AI in Birmingham

    He studied artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Birmingham, then completed an MSc in Advanced Computer Science there before joining Google.

  2. 2011–2015

    From software to research

    He joined Google as a software engineer in 2011 and moved to Google Research in 2015.

  3. 2017

    An architecture built on attention

    He co-authored Attention Is All You Need with seven colleagues. The paper proposed the Transformer architecture based solely on attention and showed gains on machine translation with faster, more parallel training.

  4. 2020–2023

    From Google Japan to Sakana

    He moved to Google Japan in 2020. In 2023, he left Google and co-founded Sakana AI in Tokyo with David Ha and Ren Ito, serving as its CTO.

  5. 2026

    An honorary degree

    The University of Birmingham awarded him an honorary degree at its July 2026 graduation ceremonies.

  6. 2026

    Questioning Transformer scale

    In a debate on Transformer and post-Transformer models, he questioned whether scaling Transformers alone could take AI to AGI.

  7. Since 2023

    Leading Sakana AI

    As of October 2026, he is a co-founder and CTO of Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI research and development company.

Sources and credits

Photo: Syced, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Llion Jones, Alumni - University of Birmingham birmingham.ac.uk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. 採用候補者向け Sakana AI Applied Team 紹介 sakana.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Llion Jones · DLD Speaker dldnews.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Seven honorary degree recipients for 25/26 summer graduations - University of Birmingham birmingham.ac.uk. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Attention is All You Need research.google. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. [1706.03762] Attention Is All You Need arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. Corporate Info — Sakana AI sakana.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. Introducing Sakana AI's Frontier Intelligence Group (FIG) sakana.ai. Checked 14 October 2026.