Veteran Google DeepMind Researcher to Launch Startup

David Silver, a well-known Google DeepMind researcher who played a critical role in many of the company’s most famous breakthroughs, has left the company to form a London-based startup called Ineffable Intelligence, Jeremy Kahn reported for Fortune Tech.

Silver is best known for his work on reinforcement learning—a method of training AI models through experience rather than historical data—and has long been one of its most vocal proponents. (Photo: ACM Awards) 

The company is actively recruiting AI researchers and seeking venture capital funding, a source said. It aims to build “an endlessly learning superintelligence that self-discovers the foundations of all knowledge,” according to a person familiar with Silver’s thinking.

Silver is best known for his work on reinforcement learning—a method of training AI models through experience rather than historical data—and has long been one of its most vocal proponents, arguing it is the only path to artificial intelligence that could one day surpass human knowledge.

Silver has told friends he wants to return to the “awe and wonder of solving the hardest problems in AI” and sees superintelligence—AI that would be smarter than any human and potentially smarter than all of humanity—as the field’s biggest unsolved challenge, according to the person familiar with his thinking.