Ineffable Intelligence, the London startup founded by the DeepMind researcher behind AlphaGo, has named Google Cloud as the infrastructure partner for its frontier AI lab. The deal, announced at Google Cloud’s London summit on 16 June, gives a company with grand ambitions and no product the computing scale its founder says the work demands.
The founder is the reason the announcement carries weight. David Silver led the research behind AlphaGo, the program that beat the world champion at Go, and AlphaZero, which taught itself chess, shogi, and Go from nothing but the rules.
He spent more than a decade at DeepMind running its reinforcement-learning group before leaving to start Ineffable. The new company is a bet that the self-play idea behind AlphaZero can be turned on the world itself.
That bet has a name: a “superlearner.” Ineffable describes a system that discovers knowledge from its own experience, from basic motor skills up to scientific breakthroughs, without leaning on human-generated data.
Where today’s large models train on static datasets scraped from the internet, a superlearner would generate, evaluate, and learn from experience in real time. The company frames the goal in cosmic terms, making “first contact” with superintelligence.
