DeepMind veteran David Silver raising $1B seed for AI firm
David Silver, a key figure behind DeepMind's AlphaGo, is reportedly raising a $1 billion seed round for a new AI company. The London-based venture is said to be targeting the development of "superhuman intelligence," underscoring the UK's continued role in attracting significant capital for advanced AI research and infrastructure.
- The new venture is named Ineffable Intelligence and the $1 billion seed round is reportedly being led by Sequoia Capital, with potential participation from Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft. This would be the largest seed round in European history, valuing the company at approximately $4 billion before the new investment. - Silver's core thesis is that Large Language Models (LLMs) are insufficient for achieving superintelligence because they are fundamentally limited by existing human knowledge. His new firm will instead focus on reinforcement learning, an approach where AI agents learn through trial and error in complex environments, a method he believes is key to building systems that can reason and adapt. - This move is part of a larger trend of top AI researchers leaving established labs to found their own companies; former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun is reportedly raising €500m for a "world models" startup, and Paris-based Mistral AI was founded by alumni from Google DeepMind and Meta. - The UK's AI sector has seen significant growth, with startups raising a record $7.9 billion in 2025, up from $4.4 billion in 2024. This investment accounted for 33% of all UK venture capital funding in 2025. - For CTOs, scaling engineering organizations requires evolving leadership structures, often by introducing new layers such as technical leads and engineering managers once a team grows beyond 20-30 engineers. This transition demands a shift from purely technical oversight to balancing technology strategy with broader business goals and fostering cross-functional collaboration. - In programmatic advertising, the deprecation of third-party cookies is forcing a shift towards privacy-centric models. AI is playing a larger role in this new landscape, with 88% of marketers reporting that it helps them personalize the customer journey and optimize ad buying in real-time. - The rise of AI agents is a significant trend in enterprise SaaS, with autonomous systems beginning to handle complex workflows that previously required humans to operate multiple applications. These agents can automate tasks in IT support, finance, and marketing, moving software from a reactive tool to a proactive collaborator. - In Formula 1, teams are preparing for major new regulations set for the 2026 season which will impact car and power unit design. Meanwhile, the current 2025 season saw McLaren's Lando Norris win his first driver's championship.
