A UK startup founded by one of the world’s most prominent AI researchers has raised a European record $1.1 billion seed funding.
Ineffable Intelligence is led by David Silver, a professor at University College London who is considered a global expert in reinforcement learning within AI.
He left Google DeepMind earlier this year to launch Ineffable Intelligence – a London firm developing ‘superintelligence’ by building a superlearner that can discover all knowledge from its own experience.
But what came before that?
Videogames
Silver became friends with DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis after they reportedly met during a chess tournament while Silver was studying at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Hassabis, a former developer at Lionhead Studios, co-founded videogames company Elixir Studios with Silver, who served as CTO and lead programmer.
After signing a publishing deal with Eidos Interactive, the studio released two titles which were ambitious in scope.
Republic: The Revolution attempted to simulate a functioning society with thousands of individual citizens and complex AI systems.
Evil Genius was more humorous in tone and presented players with the opportunity to become an over-the-top villain in the 1960s.
Despite planning sequels to both games and a pair of further titles, the studio closed in 2005 due to the cancellation of a major project and difficulties in securing continued support in ‘an increasingly risk-averse industry’.
Elixir IP was later acquired by Rebellion Developments.
DeepMind
Hassabis would co-found artificial intelligence leader DeepMind Technologies in 2010 – and Silver acted as a consultant for its first three years.
He joined DeepMind full-time in 2013 and Google acquired the company a year later.
At Google DeepMind, Silver’s work focused on artificially intelligent agents based on reinforcement learning. David co-led the project that combined deep learning and reinforcement learning to play Atari games directly from pixels (Nature 2015).
He also led the AlphaGo project, culminating in the first program to defeat a top professional player in the full-size game of Go (Nature 2016), and the AlphaZero project, which learned by itself to defeat the world’s strongest chess, shogi and Go programs (Nature 2017, Science 2018) – even without knowledge of the rules (Science 2020).
He then co-led the AlphaStar project, which led to the world’s first grandmaster level StarCraft player (Nature 2019).
He also contributed to AlphaFold, the program that solved the protein folding problem (Nature 2020, Nature 2021), and AlphaProof, which achieved a medal in the international mathematics olympiad (2024).
His work has been recognised by the ACM Prize in Computing, Marvin Minsky award, Mensa Foundation Prize, Royal Academy of Engineering (aka Princess Royal) Silver Medal, ACM Fellowship, Royal Society Fellowship, and Academy of the Mathematical Sciences Fellowship.
Silver left Google DeepMind earlier this year to launch Ineffable Intelligence – a London firm developing ‘superintelligence’ by building a superlearner that can discover all knowledge from its own experience.
He says large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are fast-tracked intelligence but flawed as they rely upon human knowledge, rather than computers learning from computers.
Testimonials
“Very few founders in the world could credibly set out to build a superlearner – a system that discovers new knowledge from its own experience, rather than ours,” said Josephine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI.
“David is one of them.
“From AlphaGo to AlphaZero to AlphaProof, he has spent nearly two decades turning reinforcement learning from a research idea into the results the rest of the field builds on.”
Charlotte Lawrence, managing director of direct equity, British Business Bank, said: “David Silver is a generational talent who has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI development.
“Ineffable Intelligence has the potential to produce a paradigm shift in our scientific and technology landscape, and we are incredibly excited to be supporting him and his team in this endeavour.”
George Mills, investment director at the British Business Bank, said: “Ineffable Intelligence is aiming to address one of the most significant opportunities within AI, superintelligence, which has the potential to open new frontier applications including in advanced problem solving and new product development with relevance across sectors.
“The UK produces world-class AI talent, and we are pleased to back strategically important businesses to scale and stay in the UK.”
Ineffable Intelligence has been backed by the Government’s Sovereign AI Fund and the British Business Bank – the latter of which invested £15 million – as well as Sequioa, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Index, Google, EQT, Evantic, Flying Fish, DST Global and BOND.