AI Startup Ineffable Intelligence Secures $1.1 Billion Seed Funding

British artificial intelligence startup Ineffable Intelligence has raised $1.1 billion in seed funding, valuing the company at $5.1 billion. Lightspeed Ventures and Sequoia Capital led the round, with participation from Nvidia Corp., Google LLC, and the U.K.’s Sovereign AI Fund.

The company is led by prominent AI researcher David Silver, formerly of DeepMind, where he was instrumental in developing AlphaGo, the AI that famously defeated a world-ranked Go player. DeepMind later applied similar technologies to create AlphaProof, an AI that won a medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Ineffable Intelligence aims to build an AI model, dubbed a 'superlearner,' capable of acquiring entirely new knowledge, potentially accelerating scientific research. The startup plans to use reinforcement learning, a method where AI learns through trial and error, to develop its superlearner.

Unlike traditional approaches, Ineffable Intelligence will skip the pre-training step and place its AI models in simulations to learn from each other, a strategy reminiscent of AlphaGo's self-play training.

This substantial raise follows a similar $1.03 billion funding round for AMI Labs Inc., another early-stage AI startup founded by Chief Executive Yann LeCun.