Llion Jones had a big role at Google, where he worked for almost 12 years. He was one of eight authors of the pivotal Transformers research paper, which is central to the latest in generative artificial intelligence.
However, like all of his co-authors, Jones has now left Google. He’s joining fellow ex-Google researcher David Ha to build a generative AI research lab in Tokyo called Sakana AI. Jones said that while he has no ill will toward Google, he realized that the company’s size was keeping him from doing the kind of work he wanted to pursue.
“It’s just a side effect of big company-itis,” Jones told CNBC in an interview. “I think the bureaucracy had built to the point where I just felt like I couldn’t get anything done.”
Jones, who studied AI in college and has a masters in advanced computer science from the University of Birmingham, is at the center of the action. The 2017 paper he helped write at Google laid out innovations that played into OpenAI’s creation of the viral chatbot ChatGPT. The T stands for Transformers, an architecture behind much of today’s frenetic generative AI activity.
“We’re kind of crazy,” Jones said. “We’re looking at nature-inspired methods to see if we can find a different way of doing things, rather than doing a huge, humongous model.” Sakana isn’t announcing any investors.
Jones became a software engineer at Google’s YouTube in 2012. According to his LinkedIn profile, he started “researching machine intelligence and natural language understanding” at Google in 2015.
Google is one of a number of large tech companies that hired hordes of researchers in recent years, some straight from universities, to construct AI models aimed at enriching their products. Over time, Jones said he encountered questions about why the software was malfunctioning and whose fault it was. He found it all to be a distraction from the research.
“Every day I would be spending my time trying to get access to resources, trying to get access to data,” Jones said.
Now, after many years building products in labs, Google is rushing to incorporate generative AI, including large language models (LLMs), into its search engine, YouTube and other products. The models can summarize information and come up with human-like responses to written questions.
In Jones’ view, Google is focusing “the entire company around this one technology,” and innovation is more challenging “because that’s quite a restrictive framework,” he said.
Ha said he and Jones have spoken with others who want to work on LLMs, but they haven’t finalized their plans.
“I would be surprised if language models were not part of the future,” said Ha, who left Google last year to be head of research at startup Stability AI. He said he doesn’t want Sakana to just be another company with an LLM.
Both Jones and Ha have unflattering things to say about OpenAI, which has brought the concept of generative AI to the mainstream but raised billions of dollars from Microsoft and other investors to do so. Ha described it as “becoming so big and a bit bureaucratic,” no different really than groups within Google.
Jones said he doesn’t think OpenAI is all that innovative. He said that for OpenAI’s two biggest successes, ChatGPT and the DALL-E service for creating images with a few words of text, the startup took research he performed at Google and applied it on a large scale, making refinements along the way but holding off on sharing the developments with the community. While OpenAI has released neither of the technologies under an open-source license, it has published papers on some of the underlying systems.
Representatives from Google and OpenAI didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Ha said Sakana has brought on a part-time researcher from academia, and the company will eventually hire more people. Asked if they’ve added any other Google employees, Ha said, “Not yet.”
Paxton sued Google in 2022 for allegedly unlawfully tracking and collecting the private data of users.
The attorney general said the settlement, which covers allegations in two separate lawsuits against the search engine and app giant, dwarfed all past settlements by other states with Google for similar data privacy violations.
Google’s settlement comes nearly 10 months after Paxton obtained a $1.4 billion settlement for Texas from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to resolve claims of unauthorized use of biometric data by users of those popular social media platforms.
“In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law,” Paxton said in a statement on Friday.
“For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won,” said Paxton.
“This $1.375 billion settlement is a major win for Texans’ privacy and tells companies that they will pay for abusing our trust.”
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said the company did not admit any wrongdoing or liability in the settlement, which involves allegations related to the Chrome browser’s incognito setting, disclosures related to location history on the Google Maps app, and biometric claims related to Google Photo.
Castaneda said Google does not have to make any changes to products in connection with the settlement and that all of the policy changes that the company made in connection with the allegations were previously announced or implemented.
“This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” Castaneda said.
“We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”
Virtual care company Omada Health filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital health company that’s signaled its intent to hit the public markets despite a turbulent economy.
Founded in 2012, Omada offers virtual care programs to support patients with chronic conditions like prediabetes, diabetes and hypertension. The company describes its approach as a “between-visit care model” that is complementary to the broader health-care ecosystem, according to its prospectus.
Revenue increased 57% in the first quarter to $55 million, up from $35.1 million during the same period last year, the filing said. The San Francisco-based company generated $169.8 million in revenue during 2024, up 38% from $122.8 million the previous year.
Omada’s net loss narrowed to $9.4 million during its first quarter from $19 million during the same period last year. It reported a net loss of $47.1 million in 2024, compared to a $67.5 million net loss during 2023.
The IPO market has been largely dormant across the tech sector for the past three years, and within digital health, it’s been almost completely dead. After President Donald Trump announced a sweeping tariff policy that plunged U.S. markets into turmoil last month, taking a company public is an even riskier endeavor. Online lender Klarna delayed its long-anticipated IPO, as did ticket marketplace StubHub.
But Omada Health isn’t the first digital health company to file for its public market debut this year. Virtual physical therapy startup Hinge Health filed its prospectus in March, and provided an update with its first-quarter earnings on Monday, a signal to investors that it’s looking to forge ahead.
Omada contracts with employers, and the company said it works with more than 2,000 customers and supports 679,000 members as of March 31. More than 156 million Americans suffer from at least one chronic condition, so there is a significant market opportunity, according to the company’s filing.
In 2022, Omada announced a $192 million funding round that pushed its valuation above $1 billion. U.S. Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Fidelity’s FMR LLC are the largest outside shareholders in the company, each owning between 9% and 10% of the stock.
“To our prospective shareholders, thank you for learning more about Omada. I invite you join our journey,” Omada co-founder and CEO Sean Duffy said in the filing. “In front of us is a unique chance to build a promising and successful business while truly changing lives.”
Liz Reid, vice president, search, Google speaks during an event in New Delhi on December 19, 2022.
Sajjad Hussain | AFP | Getty Images
Testimony in Google‘s antitrust search remedies trial that wrapped hearings Friday shows how the company is calculating possible changes proposed by the Department of Justice.
Google head of search Liz Reid testified in court Tuesday that the company would need to divert between 1,000 and 2,000 employees, roughly 20% of Google’s search organization, to carry out some of the proposed remedies, a source with knowledge of the proceedings confirmed.
The testimony comes during the final days of the remedies trial, which will determine what penalties should be taken against Google after a judge last year ruled the company has held an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search.
The DOJ, which filed the original antitrust suit and proposed remedies, asked the judge to force Google to share its data used for generating search results, such as click data. It also asked for the company to remove the use of “compelled syndication,” which refers to the practice of making certain deals with companies to ensure its search engine remains the default choice in browsers and smartphones.
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The DOJ also proposed the company divest its Chrome browser but that was not included in Reid’s initial calculation, the source confirmed.
Reid on Tuesday said Google’s proprietary “Knowledge Graph” database, which it uses to surface search results, contains more than 500 billion facts, according to the source, and that Google has invested more than $20 billion in engineering costs and content acquisition over more than a decade.
“People ask Google questions they wouldn’t ask anyone else,” she said, according to the source.
Reid echoed Google’s argument that sharing its data would create privacy risks, the source confirmed.
Closing arguments for the search remedies trial will take place May 29th and 30th, followed by the judge’s decision expected in August.
The company faces a separate remedies trial for its advertising tech business, which is scheduled to begin Sept. 22.