Ineffable Intelligence hires six cofounders from Google DeepMind, InstaDeep, Flying Fish

David Silver, the ex-Google DeepMind researcher who helped build the AI that crushed humanity’s best StarCraft II players, is assembling what looks like an AI Avengers roster. His London-based startup Ineffable Intelligence has brought on six new “cofounders,” pulling senior talent from DeepMind, InstaDeep, and Flying Fish to chase an absurdly ambitious goal: building what the company calls a “superlearner.” The hiring spree comes after Ineffable closed a $1.1 billion seed round, the largest seed financing in European startup history, giving the pre-revenue company a $5.1 billion valuation. The team behind the team Four of the six new cofounders are former DeepMind colleagues of Silver’s. Chris Apps, Wojciech Czarnecki, and Junhyuk Oh all worked with Silver on AlphaStar, the 2019 AI system that achieved grandmaster-level play in StarCraft II, a game so strategically complex that it was considered a frontier challenge for artificial intelligence at the time. The fourth DeepMind alumnus, Lasse Espeholt, took a different path at Google. He helped build MetNet, Google’s weather prediction AI models that pushed the boundaries of what machine learning could do with atmospheric data. The ...