David Silver is behind Ineffable Intelligence, valued at $5.1bn – Google
The UK has backed a British scientist’s “self-learning” AI start-up that is promising to leapfrog rivals in the race to superintelligence.
Ineffable Intelligence, founded by the former Google DeepMind executive David Silver, has raised a record $1.1bn (£810m) in a deal backed by the taxpayer.
The investment is the biggest-ever “seed” round in a European start-up, valuing Ineffable Intelligence at $5.1bn.
The taxpayer-funded British Business Bank is investing $20m in the company as part of the funding, which is led by US venture capital giants Sequoia and Lightspeed.
The Government’s £500m Sovereign AI fund is also investing an undisclosed sum as part of a push to help UK companies catch up with rivals abroad.
Ineffable Intelligence, set up just five months ago, believes its AI system can improve on rivals such as ChatGPT by learning from its own experience.
At DeepMind, Mr Silver previously pioneered “reinforcement learning”, a way of improving artificial intelligence by trial and error. This relies on the system itself figuring out how to succeed rather than depending on human feedback.
Reinforcement learning was key to London-based DeepMind’s breakthrough systems AlphaGo and AlphaZero, which were used to surpass the world’s best chess players.
However, it has become somewhat less prominent in the era of large language models such as ChatGPT, which are instead created by ingesting massive quantities of human-generated data.
Mr Silver is betting that this type of AI will be limited by its reliance on human input, saying he is pursuing a “superintelligence” that can pursue breakthroughs in science and technology.
The company’s name refers to its claim that the knowledge acquired by its AI system will be too profound to be put into words.
“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,” the company said.
Liz Kendall, the Science and Technology Secretary, said: “We believe in this nation’s entrepreneurs and innovators and we are backing them to seize the benefits of AI for the UK.”
She said the Ineffable investment “will support a company at the very frontier of AI … underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn’t just an AI taker but an AI maker”.
Ms Kendall is due to give a speech on Tuesday at the defence and security think tank Rusi, in which she will emphasise the need to reduce Britain’s reliance on American technology.
The Government’s newly set up Sovereign AI unit is designed to tie promising AI start-ups to Britain, potentially avoiding the fate of DeepMind, which was sold to Google in 2014 for £400m and now powers the tech giant’s AI systems.