David SilverDavid Silver

Earned a BA from Christ's College, Cambridge (1997). Completed a PhD at the University of Alberta (2009), with a thesis on reinforcement learning and simulation-based search in computer Go -- laying the theoretical groundwork for what would become AlphaGo. Consulted for DeepMind from 2010, joined full-time in 2013. Led the reinforcement learning research group and the AlphaGo project that defeated world champion Lee Sedol in 2016 (watched live by 200M+ people). Created AlphaGo Zero (learning from scratch) and AlphaZero (mastering chess, shogi, and Go from self-play alone). Won the ACM Prize in Computing (2019) and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (2021). Left DeepMind in January 2026 and founded Ineffable Intelligence.