David Silver’s Ineffable opens with $1.1B to build “superlearners”

Ineffable Intelligence’s first major X post on April 27 was only a few lines long, but it carried a very large signal. The new lab is led by David Silver, one of the most influential figures in reinforcement learning, and its public thesis is far more ambitious than shipping another chatbot wrapper. On its newly launched official site, the company says its mission is to “make first contact with superintelligence” and repeatedly uses the phrase “superlearners” for systems that discover knowledge through experience.

“Led by David Silver, we’re assembling the best engineers and researchers in the world to make first contact with superintelligence.”

This is not a mature corporate account with years of product updates behind it. It is a fresh lab introducing itself to the market in real time, so the surrounding context matters. A same-day Reuters report says Ineffable raised $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation, with Sequoia and Lightspeed leading the round and Nvidia, Google, and UK public capital participating. That makes the launch more than a branding exercise. Capital at that scale gives the lab room to recruit aggressively and pursue a longer technical bet.

Silver’s background is the other reason the tweet matters. Reuters identifies him as a former DeepMind researcher and a professor at University College London, while the site’s language makes clear that Ineffable wants to push a reinforcement-learning-first path rather than depend mainly on human-generated corpora. The point is not simply “more compute.” The point is whether systems can learn by acting in environments and extracting their own signals, the same family of ideas that made Silver’s earlier DeepMind work so influential.

What to watch next is whether Ineffable can move from grand language to technical artifacts. A research agenda, early hires, environment design, and the first concrete benchmark or paper will tell us whether “superlearners” is a real program or a powerful fundraising slogan. Either way, this tweet marked one of the most consequential new lab debuts of the month.