David Silver was born in 1976 and studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1997. He co-founded the games studio Elixir Studios as CTO and lead programmer before returning to study.
In 2004 he began a PhD at the University of Alberta, finishing in 2009 with a thesis on reinforcement learning and computer Go. He received a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011 and became a lecturer at University College London.
He consulted for DeepMind from 2010 and joined full time in 2013. He led AlphaGo and AlphaZero development, and his team developed AlphaStar. He won the ACM Prize in Computing in 2019 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021.
He founded Ineffable Intelligence in November 2025 and left Google DeepMind in January 2026. In February 2026 it reportedly sought a $1 billion seed round at a $4 billion valuation, and in April 2026 he raised $1.1 billion at $5.1 billion. He pledged all his equity proceeds to charity.