GoKawiilDavid Silver gave the world its very first glimpse of superintelligence.
In 2016, an AI program he developed at Google DeepMind, AlphaGo, taught itself to play the famously difficult game of Go with a kind of mastery that went far beyond mimicry.
Silver has since founded his own company, Ineffable Intelligence, that aims to build more general forms of AI superintelligence. The company will do this, Silver says, by focusing on reinforcement learning, which involves AI models learning new capabilities through trial and error. The vision is to create “superlearners” that go beyond human intelligence in many domains.
This approach stands in contrast to how most AI companies plan to build superintelligence, by exploiting the coding and research capabilities of large-language models.
Silver, speaking to WIRED from his office in London, says he thinks this approach will fail. As amazing as LLMs are, they learn from human intelligence—rather than building their own.
“Human data is like a kind of fossil fuel that has provided an amazing shortcut,” Silver says. “You can think of systems that learn for themselves as a renewable fuel—something that can just learn and learn and learn forever, without limit,” he says.
I’ve met Silver a few times and—despite this proclamation—he’s always struck me as one of the more humble people in AI. Sometimes, when talking about ideas he considers silly, he flashes a puckish grin. Right now, though, he’s deadly serious.
“I think of our mission as making first contact with superintelligence,” he says. “By superintelligence I really mean something incredible. It should discover new forms of science or technology or government or economics for itself.”
Five years ago, such a mission might have seemed ridiculous. But tech CEOs now routinely talk about machines outpacing human intelligence and replacing entire categories of workers. The idea that some new technical twist might unlock superhuman AI capabilities has recently spawned a raft of billion-dollar startups.
Ineffable Intelligence has so far raised $1.1 billion in seed funding at a valuation of $5.1 billion—an enormous sum by European AI standards. Silver has also recruited top AI researchers from Google DeepMind and other frontier labs to join his endeavor.
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