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David Silver
David Silver's file: reinforcement learning, AlphaGo, AlphaZero, DeepMind, and Ineffable Intelligence's bet that machines should learn from experience.
Silver built a career around reinforcement learning, joined DeepMind before its biggest public breakthroughs, led the systems that beat Go and then taught themselves chess and shogi, and eventually left to found a lab betting that experience — not human text — is the road to superintelligence.
HOW THE HELL DID DAVID SILVER GET HERE?
2004
HE GOES BACK TO SCHOOL FOR REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
Silver returned to academia in 2004 for a PhD focused on reinforcement learning with Rich Sutton, after earlier work in games and software.
RECEIPTS: UCLreported
2011
THE REINFORCEMENT-LEARNING PROGRAM GETS AN ACADEMIC BASE
Silver received a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and joined UCL, where he built an academic program around reinforcement learning.
RECEIPTS: UCLreported
2013
HE JOINS DEEPMIND FULL TIME
After consulting for DeepMind from its early days, Silver joined the company full time in 2013 and became one of the leaders of its reinforcement-learning program.
RECEIPTS: UCLreported
Jan 27, 2016
ALPHAGO PUTS REINFORCEMENT LEARNING ON THE FRONT PAGE
Silver led the AlphaGo work combining neural networks, search and reinforcement learning, published in Nature before the system's landmark match against Lee Sedol.
RECEIPTS: Google Researchfirst-party
Oct 18, 2017
THE MACHINE STOPS NEEDING HUMAN GAMES
Silver and DeepMind introduced AlphaGo Zero, which learned Go from self-play without training on human game data and surpassed the previous AlphaGo versions.
RECEIPTS: Google DeepMindfirst-party
Jan 15, 2026
HE LEAVES TO BUILD 'SUPERLEARNERS'
Silver announced Ineffable Intelligence, a new lab built around his thesis that superintelligence should learn continually from experience rather than primarily from human-generated data.
RECEIPTS: Ineffable Intelligencefirst-party