The young start-up said it would be ‘assembling the best engineers and researchers in the world to make first contact with superintelligence’.

Ineffable Intelligence, a UK-based AI start-up building a ‘superintelligence’ platform and founded by former Google DeepMind researcher and AI guru David Silver, has raised $1.1bn in a seed funding round.

Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed led the funding – which Ineffable said was Europe’s largest ever seed round and put the company at a $5.1bn valuation – with participation from Google, Nvidia and the UK government, among others.

In a LinkedIn post, the young start-up said it would be “assembling the best engineers and researchers in the world to make first contact with superintelligence” and “solving the hardest problems in AI on the way”.

According to Ineffable’s mission statement, its goal is to build a “superlearning capability” for an AI system with the “ability to endlessly discover knowledge and skills, without relying on human data”, by using “the world’s most powerful reinforcement learning algorithms”.

The UK government said it was backing the prospect of “algorithms that can learn for themselves and uncover new knowledge, rather than simply copying what humans already know”, through its Sovereign AI fund alongside the British Business Bank.

It described Silver, a professor at University College London, as “one of the most influential figures in modern AI”. UK science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said the investment in Ineffable “will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors”.

Silver is considered a leading authority in reinforcement learning, a foundational aspect of AI technologies.

“David Silver is a generational talent who has consistently been on the cutting edge of AI development,” said Charlotte Lawrence, managing director of direct equity at the British Business Bank.

“Ineffable Intelligence has the potential to produce a paradigm shift in our scientific and technology landscape, and we are incredibly excited to be supporting him and his team in this endeavour.”

Tech giants such as Meta are also involved in the superintelligence development race, while that company’s former AI chief Yann LeCun recently raised more than $1bn in seed funding for his own AI start-up, Advanced Machine Intelligence, at a $3.5bn valuation.

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