PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

David Silver

David Silver is CEO of Ineffable Intelligence and a UCL professor. He previously led reinforcement-learning work at DeepMind and co-led team projects including AlphaGo and AlphaZero. His papers span learning Atari games from pixels, self-play in board games, and MuZero's learned model for planning. He also advised AlphaProof and helped coordinate DeepMind's 2024 mathematics project. That result used human formalization and different time conditions from student competition. UCL dates Ineffable's founding to 2025 and describes it as an independent company. In January 2026, Silver placed learning from experience at the center of Ineffable’s mission and acknowledged a risk of failure. Its ambitions for broader intelligence remain goals that require future evidence.

Now at
Ineffable Intelligence and University College London
Works
125
Citations
155,863
h-index
66

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of David Silver

Timeline

  1. 2013

    Learning Atari from pixels

    Silver coauthored the 2013 Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning paper.

  2. March 2016

    AlphaGo faces Lee Sedol

    Silver co-led AlphaGo.

  3. December 2017

    A broader self-play method

    Silver and colleagues published AlphaZero, which learned chess, shogi, and Go through self-play with the rules supplied.

  4. July 2024

    From games to proofs

    Silver advised AlphaProof and helped coordinate the wider mathematics project.

  5. January 2026

    A stated research ambition

    In January 2026, Silver stated Ineffable's goal of learning through experience and acknowledged a risk of failure.

Sources and credits

Photo: David Silver; image supplied by davidstarsilver.wordpress.com. License: Not stated by source. Source: davidstarsilver.wordpress.com. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. David Silver: personal biography davidstarsilver.wordpress.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  2. Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning arxiv.org. Checked 10 October 2026.
  3. Google DeepMind: AlphaGo deepmind.google. Checked 10 October 2026.
  4. Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm arxiv.org. Checked 10 October 2026.
  5. Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model arxiv.org. Checked 10 October 2026.
  6. AI achieves silver-medal standard solving IMO problems deepmind.google. Checked 10 October 2026.
  7. UCL researchers lead two of Europe's largest AI funding rounds ucl.ac.uk. Checked 10 October 2026.
  8. Ineffable Intelligence: mission and A Note from Dave ineffable.chat. Checked 10 October 2026.