Google Deepmind pioneer David Silver departs to found AI startup, betting LLMs alone won't reach superintelligence

Silver's vision: AI that learns from experience, not human data

In April 2025, Silver co-authored a paper with renowned AI researcher Richard Sutton calling for a fundamental shift in AI development, away from training on human knowledge and toward systems that learn from their own experience.

The authors call this the "Era of Experience" and center their vision on world models, simulations that let AI agents predict the consequences of their actions. A key piece is continuous learning: rather than being trained once, AI agents would adapt to their environment over months or years, much like humans or animals. Silver says Ineffable Intelligence aims to build an "endlessly learning superintelligence that self-discovers the foundations of all knowledge."

Growing skepticism about current AI approaches

Silver joins a growing number of leading AI researchers who doubt the current Transformer architecture can achieve superintelligence, or even go much beyond what it's currently capable of, though some headroom remains. Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI, founded his own startup called Safe Superintelligence to explore new approaches beyond large language models.

Jerry Tworek, who helped develop OpenAI's reasoning models, recently left the company and founded Core Automation. Like Silver, he sees continuous learning as one of the final missing pieces before true AI emerges. Humans don't have a separate learning mode; everything happens at once, Tworek explained in a recent podcast interview. As long as models don't learn directly from data, their capabilities will remain limited. That kind of fundamental research, he added, is no longer possible at a heavily commercialized company like OpenAI.