After graduating from university, Silver co-founded the video games company
Elixir Studios, where he was CTO and lead programmer, receiving several awards for technology and innovation. Silver was awarded a
Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011, and subsequently became a
lecturer at
University College London. His lectures on reinforcement learning are available on YouTube.
Google DeepMind Silver consulted for
DeepMind from 2010, and joined in 2013 as a full-time employee. Silver led the AlphaGo project, culminating in the first program to defeat a top professional player in the full-size game of Go.
AlphaGo subsequently received an honorary 9-dan professional certification; and won the
Cannes Lion award for innovation. He then led development of
AlphaZero, which used the same AI to learn to play Go from scratch (learning only by playing itself and not from human games) before learning to play
chess and
shogi in the same way, to higher levels than any other computer program. His team also developed
AlphaStar, an AI program that could play
StarCraft II at a professional level. Silver has nearly 300,000 citations and an
h-index of 102 according to
Google Scholar.
Ineffable Intelligence Silver founded the AI startup Ineffable Intelligence in November 2025 and left Google DeepMind in January 2026 to become the director of Ineffable Intelligence. In April 2026, it was announced that Silver had raised $1.1bn (£880m) for Ineffable Intelligence at a valuation of $5.1bn. == Awards and honours ==