GoKawiilIneffable 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.
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