There isn’t just employee churn at the newer AI labs — some of the biggest and oldest AI labs are seeing some of their most prominent employees leave.
David Silver, who was the VP of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind, has quit to launch his own startup. The startup is named Ineffable Machines and registered in London. Ineffable Machines is actively recruiting AI researchers and is seeking venture capital funding.
Google DeepMind had informed staff of Silver’s departure earlier this month. Silver had been on sabbatical in the months leading up to his departure and never formally returned to his DeepMind role.
Google confirmed David Silver’s departure. “Dave’s contributions have been invaluable, and we’re grateful for the impact he’s had on our work at Google DeepMind,” a Google spokesperson told Fortune. Silver was the VP of Reinforcement Learning at Google. His papers had over 200,000 citations and an h-index of 97, making him among DeepMind’s most published researchers.
David Silver’s journey to becoming one of the most influential AI researchers began after university, when he co-founded Elixir Studios, serving as CTO and lead programmer at the video games company. Silver transitioned to academia in 2011 with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, becoming a lecturer at University College London where his reinforcement learning courses gained wide attention. He began consulting for DeepMind at its founding and joined the company full-time in 2013.
At DeepMind, Silver pioneered combining reinforcement learning with deep learning, developing programs that could learn to play Atari games directly from visual input. His most notable achievement was leading the AlphaGo project, creating the first AI to defeat a top professional Go player. AlphaGo earned an honorary 9 Dan Professional certification and won a Cannes Lion for innovation. Silver followed this by leading AlphaZero’s development, which learned Go, chess, and shogi from scratch through self-play alone, surpassing all existing computer programs in each game.
Silver was one of the most visible employees at Google DeepMind. He’d appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast in which he’d discussed AlphaGo and reinforcement learning, and had also appeared on several of Google’s own podcasts, as well as in its documentary ‘The Thinking Game’.
He’s now left and is working on Ineffable Intelligence. The company is registered in London and was incorporated on 19th November 2025. Its nature of business is listed as “74909 – Other professional, scientific and technical activities not elsewhere classified”.
Several senior employees at top AI labs have quit to launch their own companies. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati had quit to found Thinking Machines, while its Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever had quit to launch Safe Superintelligence. Most recently, Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun had quit to launch a new startup named AMI Labs.