Breaking: Ineffable Intelligence, founded in London by David Silver (ex DeepMind AlphaGo + more), has just come out of stealth. • $1.1B Seed round raised, possibly the the largest ever Seed round in Europe, at a valuation of $5.1B post • The mission is “to make first contact with superintelligence” using Reinforcement Learning to create a “superlearner” that can "endlessly discover knowledge and skills" without relying on human data • The fundraise was co-led by Sequoia (Alfred Lin & Sonya Huang) and Lightspeed (Ravi Mhatre, Raviraj Jain), with participation from NVIDIA, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, Flying Fish Partners, EQT Ventures & Growth, Evantic Capital, Wellcome Trust (UK), Bond Capital, British Business Bank, and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund, plus strategic angels. • Founder David Silver is a UCL professor and the former lead of DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team • He also says he's committing to giving away 100% of the money he makes from his Ineffable equity via the Founders Pledge charity - a sum which could end up amounting to many billions. More details will be updated shortly on Pathfounders below and we will update this post with more as we get it: https://lnkd.in/drRSp-P3
amazing story and love the founders pledge link!
Huge signal. The race may not just be for better models, but for entirely new ways of learning. If one path scales intelligence through language, and another through experience, the real opportunity may be the layer that helps humans decide how to use all the AI's. Intelligence is advancing fast. Judgment may become the scarcest asset.
NexaByte
4d
The $1.1B Seed is a massive signal, but the move toward a 'superlearner' that doesn’t rely on human data' is the real story here. We’re finally hitting the ceiling of what tokenized human knowledge can provide. Shifting the bottleneck from 'more data' to 'better reinforcement' is how we actually get to AGI. David Silver dominated Go with RL; seeing him apply that to general intelligence is the logical next step for the industry. A massive moment for the London ecosystem!
Ravi Sinha
4d
This isn’t about Europe, or RL vs LLM. It’s capital underwriting a path to intelligence before it’s proven — at a scale that already limits who can even play. If it works, the advantage won’t sit in the model. It will sit with whoever can sustain the burn and control where it gets deployed. That’s where these cycles end up.
I hope this funding was before any proof of concept or product was developed
Fred Destin
4d
Whilst I'm mildly terrified about what happens next as AI explodes out of its current boundaries the desire to donate every $ made is a very refreshing change !!
Ian Moss
4d
Thought I would have a play with a similar concept - got a spare million? Oh, or billion of course?https://www.garudax.id/posts/alteris_anyone-recognise-this-matrix-bonus-points-share-7454902777161396224-Og3y?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAArwdgBT_amUPI5NGEipd0g-LRI0IdPMrY
Beth Murray
5h
Bravo to the philanthropic pledge 👏👏👏👏👏
Huge signal for the direction of capital. The ambition is clear, but the interesting question is how breakthroughs here translate into practical systems businesses can actually deploy.
More details will be updated shortly on Pathfounders below and we will update this post with more as we get it: https://pathfounders.com/p/ineffable-intelligence-breaks-out-of-stealth