Ineffable Intelligence · 2026-04-27 · major
Ineffable Intelligence — David Silver Leaves DeepMind, Raises $1.1B for a 'Superlearner'
AlphaZero/AlphaGo lead David Silver leaves DeepMind to launch a new London lab on a $1.1B seed at $5.1B valuation — Europe's largest ever — co-led by Sequoia and Lightspeed with Nvidia, Google, Index, BOND, EQT, and DST Global participating.
The researcher behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero just emerged from stealth with the largest European seed in history.
Key specs
| Seed round | $1.1B |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $5.1B post-money |
| Notable | Largest European seed ever |
What is it?
Ineffable Intelligence is a London-based research lab founded by David Silver, who led the reinforcement-learning team at Google DeepMind for over a decade and is also a UCL professor. Co-founders include DeepMind alumni Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt, and Junhyuk Oh. The mission, in Silver's words, is 'to make first contact with superintelligence.'
How does it work?
Silver wants to skip pre-training and human-generated data altogether. The lab's models would learn from experience inside simulations, the same way AlphaZero learned chess and Go from self-play. Silver calls the target system a 'superlearner' — pure reinforcement learning at frontier scale. No products or papers yet; the team is hiring and building infra.
Why does it matter?
It is the most prominent DeepMind departure since Anthropic's 2021 spinout, and the largest European seed in history. Silver has also pledged 100% of his personal equity gains to charity through Founders Pledge — its biggest commitment ever. The bet — that experience-based RL beats pre-training-and-fine-tune — could pull serious talent and capex away from the dominant LLM playbook.
Who is it for?
RL researchers, AI investors, anyone tracking the post-LLM frontier.