The British Business Bank has committed $20m to Ineffable Intelligence, the London-headquartered artificial intelligence venture, as part of a landmark $1.1bn seed round that ranks as the largest in European history.
In a move that signals a sharpening of the Government’s industrial strategy around frontier technology, the state-owned development bank has co-invested alongside the Sovereign AI Fund, the Treasury-backed vehicle established to keep strategically significant AI businesses anchored on these shores. The Sovereign AI Fund has put in further capital on top of the Bank’s contribution, although the precise figure has not been disclosed.
The British cheques sit within a syndicate that reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley capital. Sequoia, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Index Ventures, Google, EQT, Evantic, Flying Fish, DST Global and BOND have all joined the round, lending weight to the argument that Britain remains capable of attracting deep-pocketed foreign investors to its homegrown technology champions despite persistent concerns about the country’s appetite for risk.
Ineffable Intelligence is the brainchild of David Silver, the University College London professor widely regarded as one of the most influential reinforcement learning researchers of his generation. Silver previously ran the reinforcement learning team at Google DeepMind and is credited with pivotal work on AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold and AlphaProof, the systems that successively rewrote what machines were thought capable of in domains ranging from board games to protein folding and mathematical reasoning.
His new venture has set itself a deliberately audacious mission: to build what Silver calls a “superlearner”, a system capable of discovering knowledge from its own experience rather than relying on the data humans feed it. If realised, the technology would represent a step change beyond today’s large language models, which remain heavily dependent on training material drawn from the internet.
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