David Silver

Career and research After graduating from university, Silver co-founded the video games company Elixir Studios, where he was CTO and lead programmer, receiving several awards for technology and innovation.

Silver was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011, and subsequently became a lecturer at University College London. His lectures on reinforcement learning are available on YouTube.

Google DeepMind Silver consulted for DeepMind from 2010, and joined in 2013 as a full-time employee. Silver led the AlphaGo project, culminating in the first program to defeat a top professional player in the full-size game of Go. AlphaGo subsequently received an honorary 9-dan professional certification; and won the Cannes Lion award for innovation. He then led development of AlphaZero, which used the same AI to learn to play Go from scratch (learning only by playing itself and not from human games) before learning to play chess and shogi in the same way, to higher levels than any other computer program. His team also developed AlphaStar, an AI program that could play StarCraft II at a professional level.

Silver has over 300,000 citations and an h-index of 104 according to Google Scholar.

Ineffable Intelligence Silver founded the AI startup Ineffable Intelligence in November 2025 and left Google DeepMind in January 2026 to become the director of Ineffable Intelligence. In April 2026, it was announced that Silver had raised $1.1bn (£880m) for Ineffable Intelligence at a valuation of $5.1bn.

Silver pledged to donate 100% of his equity proceeds in Ineffable Intelligence, marking the largest commitment in the history of Founders Pledge.

Awards and honours Silver was awarded the 2019 ACM Prize in Computing for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing.

In 2021, Silver was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) for his contributions to Deep Q-Networks and AlphaGo. He was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2022.