University of Cambridge
University of Alberta
Thore GraepelChair of Machine Learning · UCLResearcher↗
Researcher · Academic · Founder · Executive
David Silver
Ineffable IntelligenceFounder and CEO
UCLProfessor
🇬🇧 BritishBorn 1976
Silver led AlphaGo, which defeated a world champion at Go, and AlphaZero, which learned chess, shogi, and Go largely through self-play.[1] These systems showed that reinforcement learning could discover powerful strategies from experience, an approach he is now extending beyond games through Ineffable Intelligence.[2]
Career & education
Current rolesIneffable Intelligence2025-presentFounder and CEO
Ineffable Intelligence2025-presentProfessor
Previously
Google DeepMind2013-2026Head of Reinforcement Learning
Elixir Studios1998-2005Co-founder
Google DeepMind2013-2026Elixir Studios1998-2005Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations330,913As of Nov 1, '26
citations+6,798Since last snapshot, Oct 1, '26
Selected contributions
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
With John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool and others ·Presented AlphaFold 2, predicting proteins' three-dimensional shapes from their sequences.
Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
With Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Andrei A. Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin Riedmiller and others ·Presented DQN, learning to play 49 Atari games from screen images and game scores.
Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search
With Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou and others ·AlphaGo combined neural networks and search to beat a professional Go player.
References
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Reviewed August 9, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.
