A U.K. startup that aims to steer AI in a new direction has raised $1.1 billion in funding at a valuation of $5.1 billion -- reported to be the largest seed financing for a European company yet.
Ineffable Intelligence is a London-based vendor that is the brainchild of former Google DeepMind researcher David Silver, who has said that the pursuit of superintelligence -- AI that exceeds human capabilities -- is his “life’s work.”
Silver’s involvement has captured the attention of a strong cast of investors, with the financing led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, backed up by a host of other participants, including Nvidia, Google, DST Global and the U.K.’s recently formed government-backed Sovereign AI initiative.
What makes Ineffable stand out is its mission that it can build algorithms that learn from themselves using reinforcement learning, rather than following the example of many AI models, which rely on human data.
According to Silver, this method will create a ”superlearner” able to teach itself everything from “elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs,” with the potential to transcend accepted benchmarks in the likes of language, science, mathematics and technology.
He expands on this vision in a paper co-authored with another computer scientist, Richard Sutton, entitled in which he says: “We stand on the threshold of a new era in artificial intelligence that promises to achieve an unprecedented level of ability. A new generation of agents will acquire superhuman capabilities by learning predominantly from experience.”
The company isn’t holding back in its claims as to what this means and how it will be achieved. It says the knowledge and skills attainable by superintelligence will be the “most transformative moment” in history.
Ineffable says superintelligence will be with us within years, rather than decades or centuries.
Investors’ conviction that Silver -- a professor at University College London -- can create such a superlearner is based on his track record at DeepMind, where he created AlphaGo, an AI system that was able to comprehensively defeat a human world champion in the ancient Chinese game of Go.
DeepMind went on to develop AlphaZero, another AI program that achieved world-level performance by self-play in other games, including chess, fueling the idea that tech can solve complex problems beyond the reach of humans.
While Ineffable does not yet have a defined product roadmap, the funding will go toward ongoing research, with the company currently recruiting AI talent as it seeks to gain further momentum.
The funding round was made public on April 27.
