creators

David Silver: AlphaGo lead, Ineffable CEO

David Silver led AlphaGo and AlphaZero at DeepMind. He is now CEO of Ineffable Intelligence, which raised $1.1bn in April 2026, and a professor at UCL.

David Silver (born 1976) is a British AI researcher known for leading the AlphaGo project and co-leading AlphaZero. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Cambridge in 1997 and 2000 and a PhD in computer science at the University of Alberta in 2009; a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011 took him to University College London as a lecturer. He consulted for DeepMind from its early days, joined full time in 2013 and led its reinforcement learning research until January 2026. He co-led the work that combined deep learning with reinforcement learning to play Atari games from pixels, led AlphaGo, the first program to beat a top professional at full-size Go, and co-led AlphaZero, which learned Go, chess and shogi from self-play alone. He received the 2019 ACM Prize in Computing for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021. Silver founded Ineffable Intelligence in November 2025 and left Google DeepMind in January 2026 to run it. In April 2026 the British company raised $1.1 billion at a $5.1 billion valuation, led by Sequoia and Lightspeed, to build a 'superlearner' that discovers knowledge from its own experience instead of from human data. His own site describes him as CEO of Ineffable Intelligence and a professor at University College London.

Specialization

reinforcement learning, deep learning, game-playing AI

Country

United Kingdom