{"id":19046,"date":"2026-04-27T21:53:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T21:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/19046\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T21:53:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T21:53:18","slug":"uk-backs-self-learning-ai-start-up-in-effort-to-catch-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/19046\/","title":{"rendered":"UK backs \u2018self-learning\u2019 AI start-up in effort to catch up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"David David Silver is behind Ineffable Intelligence, valued at $5.1bn – Google <\/p>\n

The UK has backed a British scientist\u2019s \u201cself-learning\u201d AI start-up that is promising to leapfrog rivals in the race to superintelligence.<\/p>\n

Ineffable Intelligence, founded by the former Google DeepMind executive David Silver<\/a>, has raised a record $1.1bn (\u00a3810m) in a deal backed by the taxpayer.<\/p>\n

The investment is the biggest-ever \u201cseed\u201d round in a European start-up, valuing Ineffable Intelligence at $5.1bn.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Government\u2019s \u00a3500m Sovereign AI fund is also investing an undisclosed sum as part of a push to help UK companies catch up with rivals abroad.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

At DeepMind, Mr Silver previously pioneered \u201creinforcement learning\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

Reinforcement learning was key to London-based DeepMind\u2019s breakthrough systems AlphaGo<\/a> and AlphaZero, which were used to surpass the world\u2019s best chess players.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mr Silver is betting that this type of AI will be limited by its reliance on human input, saying he is pursuing a \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that can pursue breakthroughs in science and technology.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s name refers to its claim that the knowledge acquired by its AI system will be too profound to be put into words.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf 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,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n

Liz Kendall, the Science and Technology Secretary, said: \u201cWe believe in this nation\u2019s entrepreneurs and innovators and we are backing them to seize the benefits of AI for the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said the Ineffable investment \u201cwill support a company at the very frontier of AI … underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn\u2019t just an AI taker but an AI maker\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s reliance on American technology.<\/p>\n

The Government\u2019s 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 \u00a3400m and now powers the tech giant\u2019s AI systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Silver is behind Ineffable Intelligence, valued at $5.1bn – Google The UK has backed a British scientist\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[25,13608,13351,5044,132,7543,13440,9478,7741,9684,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-19046","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-google","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-british-business-bank","10":"tag-david-silver","11":"tag-deepmind","12":"tag-google","13":"tag-google-deepmind","14":"tag-ineffable-intelligence","15":"tag-liz-kendall","16":"tag-reinforcement-learning","17":"tag-superintelligence","18":"tag-uk"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}