Llion Jones is a machine learning researcher and co-founder of Sakana AI. He is one of the eight co-authors of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), the Google paper that introduced the transformer architecture underlying modern large language models. Jones spent over a decade at Google before co-founding Sakana AI with David Ha in 2023.
Background
Jones worked at Google for over a decade. While there, he was among the eight co-authors of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), which introduced the transformer architecture that underlies modern large language models.
Sakana AI
Jones left Google to co-found Sakana AI with David Ha in 2023. Sakana AI pursues nature-inspired and evolutionary approaches to AI, distinct from approaches based on scaling model and compute size.
As a transformer co-author, Jones is part of the group of researchers behind the technical work that preceded the current era of foundation models. Several of the paper's co-authors have since founded their own companies, a pattern that has been cited as an example of foundational AI expertise migrating from large labs to startups.
Relationships
- leads: Sakana AI — co-founder
- related: Attention Is All You Need — co-author of the foundational transformer paper
- related: David Ha — co-founder of Sakana AI