David Silver (born 1976) is an AI researcher and the CEO of the AI startup Ineffable Intelligence. He is also a professor at University College London.

From 2013 to 2026, Silver worked full-time at DeepMind, leading reinforcement learning research. He notably led the development of AlphaGo and AlphaZero.

Education

He studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award, and having befriended Demis Hassabis whilst at Cambridge. Silver returned to academia in 2004 at the University of Alberta to study for a PhD on reinforcement learning, where he co-introduced the algorithms used in the first master-level 9×9 Go programs and graduated in 2009. His version of program MoGo (co-authored with Sylvain Gelly) was one of the strongest Go programs as of 2009.

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.

His work focused on deep reinforcement learning, a field combining reinforcement learning with deep learning. Early work included a program that learns to play Atari games directly from pixels. 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 nearly 300,000 citations and an h-index of 102 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 February 2026, the startup was seeking a $1 billion seed funding round at a $4 billion valuation.

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.