A MAN born in Bangor who is now developing cutting-edge AI for Google has spoken about his journey to America.

Llion Jones is now a software engineer for the internet giant at its massive headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The 34-year-old is a former Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor student, who previously lived in Abergynolwyn in south Gwynedd.

Whilst at the campus, Llion received A-levels in Mathematics, Computing, Physics and Chemistry. He then went on to gain a First Class degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham before achieving a Masters in Advanced Computer Science.

"Discovering programming and how exactly a computer worked during my time in Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor was a real eye-opener," Llion said.

"It helped me understand things that I previously thought were beyond me. I had the realization that I could make these 'magic boxes' do literally anything with the right code and that hooked me for life.

"My fondest memories from the college are of my teacher, Graham Hall. He was the first person to see potential in me and helped me realise it. He's a fantastic teacher and person."

Despite achieving so much at academic level, Llion struggled to find a job after leaving university in 2009.

After six months of unsuccessful job applications and interviews, he sent off his CV for a generic "software engineer" position with Google in London.

Llion passed two interviews on the phone with the company and after they eventually got back to him, he declined their offer as he had just started another job in Birmingham.

That could have been the end of the story, but 18 months later another Google recruiter reached out to ask if he wanted to re-apply.

Since 2012, he has worked at Google’s Mountain View campus, commuting in for an hour and a half a day from San Francisco.

"What's really mad is the fact that there's almost 100 times more people at my place of work now than there is living in the village I grew up in – 200 compared to 20,000," Llion said.

"I see self-driving cars and people on hoverboards all the time here, it's just normal now.

Llion works for well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil and conducts regular one-on-one meetings with him.

Discussing his work, Llion said: “Artificial Intelligence is just fascinating, from a scientific, philosophical and ethical view.

"I'm at the forefront of an effort to reverse engineer literally the most complex thing in the known universe: the human mind.

"The specific thing I'm working on so far as I can tell you is on Question Answering. That is, getting a computer to be able to read and understand natural text well enough to answer natural language questions about it."