David Silver

David Silver graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award; he then co-founded the video games company Elixir Studios, where he was chief technology officer and lead programmer.⁠[1]

In 2004 he returned to academia to study for a PhD on reinforcement learning at the University of Alberta with Rich Sutton; research he began there later fed into AlphaGo.⁠[2][3]

He consulted for DeepMind from its inception and joined full-time in 2013, and also became a lecturer at University College London.⁠[1]

He co-led the project that combined deep learning and reinforcement learning to play Atari games directly from pixels.⁠[4]

He was first author of the Nature paper “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search,” in which AlphaGo achieved a 99.8% winning rate against other Go programs and defeated the European Go champion 5 games to 0.⁠[5]

On March 15, 2016, AlphaGo, the project he led, defeated the Korean Go player Lee Se-dol 4–1. Of Lee’s 78th move in game four, he said the probability of a professional playing it was “1 in 10,000.”⁠[6]

On October 18, 2017, he and Demis Hassabis introduced AlphaGo Zero, published in Nature: learning only by playing against itself, it defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo 100 games to 0 after three days of self-play training.⁠[7]

In 2018 he gave his inaugural lecture at UCL, describing how AlphaZero, starting from random play with no knowledge beyond the rules, reached superhuman play in Go, chess and shogi within 24 hours.⁠[1]

That year he was first author of the AlphaZero paper in Science, showing that AlphaZero convincingly defeated world champion programs in chess and shogi.⁠[8]

He received the 2019 ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry Prize in Computing, cited “For breakthrough advances in computer game-playing.”⁠[3]

DeepMind’s AI program AlphaStar reached Grandmaster rank on StarCraft II’s official site, Battle.net, mastering all three races in the game and becoming able to defeat 99.8 percent of players online; the work was described in a paper in Nature. He, then a principal research scientist at DeepMind, said: “StarCraft has emerged by consensus as the next grand challenge.”⁠[9]

On April 3, 2020, he appeared on episode 86 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, “AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and Deep Reinforcement Learning”; the outline covers his first program, AlphaGo, the rules of Go, reinforcement learning, Lee Sedol’s retirement, Garry Kasparov, AlphaZero and self-play, creativity and reward functions.⁠[10]

In 2021 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, then a principal research scientist at DeepMind and professor of computer science at University College London; his honours include the Marvin Minsky award, the Mensa Foundation Prize and the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal.⁠[4]

In April 2025 he and Richard Sutton published a paper on the “Era of Experience,” arguing that progress driven by human data is slowing and that agents should learn continually from their own experience; they wrote that “experience will become the dominant medium of improvement.”⁠[11]

At DeepMind he contributed to AlphaGo, AlphaStar, AlphaZero, MuZero and AlphaProof and co-authored the 2023 paper introducing GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s original Gemini models. In January 2026 DeepMind told staff he had left; Ineffable Intelligence, the London company he founded, had been formed in November 2025. DeepMind said: “Dave’s contributions have been invaluable.”⁠[12]

In a note dated January 15, 2026, he called the mission “my life’s work”; the company says it is building a “superlearner” that discovers all knowledge from its own experience without relying on human data.⁠[13]

On April 27, 2026, Ineffable Intelligence announced a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion valuation, led by Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry and Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry with participation from Nvidia, Google, DST GlobalDST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry and the U.K. government-backed Sovereign AI initiative.⁠[14]

Ineffable Intelligence: Official website: https://www.ineffable.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

Google DeepMind: Official website: https://deepmind.google/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

University College London: Official website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]