A four-month-old London-based AI start-up has completed Europe’s largest seed funding round at a valuation of $5.1 billion.
Ineffable Intelligence, founded by David Silver in January, has raised $1.1 billion to pursue its ambition of creating a “superlearner” that can learn for itself rather than rely on human data.
The government’s new Sovereign AI Fund has backed the company alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed, Nvidia and EQT. The British Business Bank also participated in the funding round.
Silver is a professor at University College London and a former lead of Google DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team.
Reinforcement learning is a method for training AI systems through trial and error, where the model learns to achieve a goal by receiving rewards or penalties for its actions in a structured environment. Using this technique, Silver led the development of Alpha Go, the first AI system to defeat a world champion at the game Go.
Ineffable Intelligence, which is pre-revenue, hopes to develop an AI model that will be able to learn purely from its experiences, unlike other AI models which are trained on enormous sets of human-generated data.
Silver said: “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.
“This superlearning capability — the ability to endlessly discover knowledge and skills, without relying on human data — will be driven by the world’s most powerful reinforcement learning algorithms. The superlearner is expected to rediscover and then transcend the greatest inventions in human history, such as language, science, mathematics and technology.”
Silver has also committed to give away all the money made from his equity stake in Ineffable via Founders Pledge, a charity that encourages entrepreneurs to donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. This is likely to amount to multiple billions, the company said.
David Goldberg, Founders Pledge’s president and founder, said: “This is the largest pledge in Founders Pledge’s history and a powerful example of what’s possible when founders engage with philanthropy at scale.”
Ineffable Intelligence’s funding round is the latest example of leading AI researchers starting their own ventures outside of big tech firms. Tim Rocktäschel, a former DeepMind researcher, recently launched Recursive Superintelligence which raised $500 million this month. Yann LeCun, formerly Meta’s chief AI scientist, announced a $1 billion raise for his new venture AMI Labs in March.
Ineffable Intelligence is the second company to receive investment from the Sovereign AI Fund, which was launched this month to invest in British AI companies.
Joséphine Kant, head of ventures at the Sovereign AI Unit, said: “Ineffable is being built in the UK — and that matters. Our job at Sovereign AI is to make sure founders with this level of ambition never have to choose between it and their home — backing them with the speed of venture and the strength of a nation, and standing behind them for the long term as they build category-defining companies.”
Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, said: “This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors, underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn’t just an AI taker but an AI maker.”