DeepMind’s David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data

Ineffable Intelligence, a British AI lab founded a mere few months ago by former DeepMind researcher David Silver, has raised $1.1 billion in funding at a valuation of $5.1 billion to join the race for novel AI models that could outperform large language models.

According to its newly launched site, Ineffable aims to create a “superlearner” capable of discovering knowledge and skills without relying on human data by leveraging reinforcement learning — a technique in which AI systems learn through trial and error rather than studying human-generated examples. This is Silver’s area of expertise.

A professor at University College London, Silver was until recently leading the reinforcement learning team at Google-owned DeepMind, where he spent more than a decade before leaving to found this new venture.

While at DeepMind, Silver was involved in developing programs that beat professional players at chess and the board game Go games by learning purely from experience, without being fed human strategies or game records — defeating the world’s top computer programs in each game. The most notable of these was AlphaZero. Similarly, Ineffable Intelligence hopes that its superlearner will discover all knowledge from its own experience.

Its superlearner may lack experience, but the company doesn’t lack ambition. “If successful, this will represent a scientific breakthrough of comparable magnitude to Darwin: where his law explained all Life, our law will explain and build all Intelligence,” its site claims (capitals included).

Referring to Ineffable Intelligence as “his life’s work” in a personal note he has since published on the company’s blog, Silver also told Wired that “any money that I make from Ineffable will go to high-impact charities that save as many lives as possible.”

It is unclear how, when or how much the venture will make money, but this clearly hasn’t hindered fundraising.

According to Wired, the round was led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Index Ventures, Google, Nvidia, and others. Among those other investors are the British Business Bank and Sovereign AI, the U.K.’s recently launched sovereign venture fund for AI.

Fast-forwarding to so-called pentacorn status — meaning companies valued at more than $5 billion — Ineffable Intelligence joins the club of AI ventures founded by star researchers whose names have attracted seed rounds so large they have been nicknamed coconut rounds (a tongue-in-cheek escalation of the “seed” round). Just last month, AMI Labs, co-founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta AI scientist Yann LeCun, raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. 

There might be more companies in this mold. Recursive Superintelligence, cofounded by DeepMind’s former principal scientist Tim Rocktäschel and incorporated in the U.K., reportedly raised $500 million, with enough demand to stretch that amount to $1 billion. 

While Recursive also has ties to the U.S., these companies suggest mounting momentum around London as an AI hub. This is partly thanks to DeepMind’s continued presence after its acquisition by Google in 2014. But it is not just DeepMind. Jeff Bezos’ AI lab, Project Prometheus, is reportedly in talks to secure office space close to Google’s AI hub. 

This also translates into a powerful network of alumni, with several former DeepMind staffers reportedly set to join Ineffable’s executive team.