Llion Jones

My Graduate Story

My name is Llion Jones and when I was at Birmingham University, I studied Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. If I think back to my experiences at the Computer Science school, I have got very fond memories and the professors and lecturers that I had back then, I think were of very high quality and extremely supportive. I think the reason that I was actually able to get into Google without having a referral was because I had such a good Computer Science school on my CV. I would absolutely recommend Birmingham University to others. I had a really good time here, very fond memories and the quality of the lecturers and the professors and the material that I learnt here definitely set me up in a big way for the success that I've had since then. If I were to give some advice to students currently studying here, I would probably think back to what I would need to hear, that there are any number of paths to success. You can get to where you need to go in many, many different ways and just sort of enjoy the journey basically.

A Day in My Life

My day-to-day, it actually looks very, very different every single day. So, all the way from managing people, managing projects, interviewing potential employees and then of course, going and giving talks and visiting conferences and things like that.

My Journey to Sakana AI

So, my current role and my current company is actually a company that I started myself in Japan, Tokyo. Somebody gave me the opportunity to start a company with them, and I was very happy to try to do something different, basically. It's called Sakana AI and I actually left Google Research in order to start it. And my current role is CTO.

Now, Sakana is the Japanese word for fish. It might sound weird to call your company ‘fish’, but the idea behind it is we're trying to do things like swarm intelligence.
So, an individual fish might not be very smart, but a school of fish can maybe have emergent behaviour and we want to apply these kind of nature-inspired ideas to AI research.

I'm well-known for being a part of the team that came up with the transformer network, which is the T in ChatGPT. And during that time at Google, we had a lot of freedom to do the research that we wanted to. So, I'm trying to recreate the same atmosphere that we had in order to be able to come up with that kind of research.

So, when I have people start at the company, I literally tell them, I want you to work on what you think is interesting, is important.

My Birmingham Experience

If I think back to my experiences at the Computer Science school, I have got very fond memories and the professors and lecturers that I had back then, I think were of very high quality and extremely supportive. I had a really good time here, very fond memories and the quality of the lecturers and the professors and the material that I learnt here definitely set me up in a big way for the success that I've had since then.