British AI researcher David Silver wants to build "superhuman intelligence" with his new London-based start-up Ineffable Intelligence. The seed round of one billion dollars would be the largest ever raised by a European start-up.
According to a report in the Financial Times, former Deepmind researcher David Silver is raising around one billion dollars for his new start-up Ineffable Intelligence. Sequoia Capital is leading the round, which is expected to value the company at roughly four billion dollars before the new money comes in. According to PitchBook, that would make it the largest seed round ever closed by a European start-up.
Silver left Google Deepmind late last year to launch his new company, also based in London. His departure kicked off a fierce competition among investors, the Financial Times reports: Sequoia managing partner Alfred Lin and partner Sonya Huang flew to London personally to meet with Silver, who also holds a professorship at University College London.
Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft are reportedly in talks to invest as well. Negotiations are still ongoing, and final terms could still shift.
Silver joined Deepmind shortly after it was founded in 2010 and had a hand in some of the AI lab's biggest breakthroughs. He was a key contributor to AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and MuZero. AlphaGo and the related program AlphaStar beat the world's top players in the strategy game Go and the video game StarCraft. After Google acquired Deepmind in 2014, the 49-year-old also played a central role in building Google's Gemini family of language models.
