By Will Knight
Publication Date: 2026-04-27 14:00:00
David Silver gave the world its first-ever glimpse of superintelligence.
In 2016, AlphaGo, an AI program he developed at Google DeepMind, taught itself to play the notoriously difficult game of Go with a mastery that went well beyond mimicry.
Since then, Silver has founded his own company, Ineffable Intelligence, which aims to develop more general forms of AI superintelligence. Silver says the company will achieve this by focusing on reinforcement learning, where AI models learn new skills through trial and error. The vision is to create “superlearners” that go beyond human intelligence in many areas.
This approach contrasts with the way most AI companies plan to build superintelligence by leveraging the coding and research capabilities of large language models.
Speaking to WIRED from his office in London, Silver said he believes this approach will fail. As amazing as LLMs are, they learn from human intelligence – rather than building their own.
“Human data is like…
