A FORMER Gwynedd student who is now developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence for Google has spoken about his journey from Abergynolwyn to Silicon Valley.

Llion Jones is a software engineer for the internet giant and considered among the elite of what he does.

But the 34-year-old lived in Abergynolwyn for years and got his A-levels in mathematics, computing, physics and chemistry at Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor’s Dolgellau campus, gaining two As and two Bs.

He said: “College was when I really started to get in to computer programming. Discovering programming and how exactly a computer worked during my time in Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor was a real eye-opener, understanding things that I previously thought were beyond me. Software was basically ‘magic’ before that.

“The realisation I could make these magic boxes do literally anything with the right code had me hooked for life.”

After studying at Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, the software expert moved onto the University of Birmingham where he gained a first class degree in computer science and artificial intelligence, and then a Masters in advanced computer science.

After successfully navigating Google’s famed intensive interview process, he now works at their main campus in Mountain View commuting in for an hour-and-a-half a day from San Francisco on Google’s own transport service.

He has been with the company since 2012, and has been there longer than 85 per cent of the company’s staff, such is the rate of growth at the company.

He said: “It’s mad that there’s almost 100 times more people at my place of work now than live in the village I grew up in – 200 compared to 20,000!

“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."

Llion has fond memories of his time at Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor. He said: “My main and fondest memories from Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor are easily of my teacher, Graham Hall.

“Graham was the first teacher that saw potential in me and helped me realise it. What a fantastic teacher and person he is.”

“I was a C-grade student since I didn’t try – because I didn’t think I’d be able to do better.

“I was an average student in secondary school but it was Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor where I started to do very well academically – mostly thanks to the staff there. 

“I don’t think you need a glowing CV to get into Google, they are mostly interested in your programming ability and have a very specific interviewing technique to assess that.

“I tell everyone that says they wished they worked there to just go for it.”