Builders & open source
David Silver
David Silver is the CEO of Ineffable Intelligence and a professor at University College London; Silver's homepage says that until recently Silver led the reinforcement learning team at DeepMind. Silver is first author of the 2017 AlphaZero paper on mastering chess and shogi through self-play reinforcement learning, and a co-author of the 2013 deep Q-network paper on learning to play Atari games from raw pixels. Silver's site also publishes the lectures and Easy21 assignment of a 2015 Advanced Topics course on reinforcement learning (COMPM050/COMPGI13) under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.1234
At a glance
- Current roles
- CEO +1 more
- Sector
- Company
- Education
- UCL, Cambridge
- Work listed
- 3
- Honors
- 6
- Sources cited
- 9
- Profile reviewed
Career
Silver's research milestones page traces the work from doctoral research at the University of Alberta, on real-time planning in games with hidden state using partially observable Monte-Carlo planning, through a postdoctoral position at MIT, where Monte-Carlo search was applied to Civilization II. At DeepMind, Silver led the reinforcement learning team until recently.51
Silver is now CEO of Ineffable Intelligence and a professor at University College London. Silver's biography describes the focus of the work as building superintelligent agents with reinforcement learning.61
Research
At DeepMind, Silver led or co-led projects that learned to play Atari games from pixels, defeated a professional Go player with AlphaGo, and learned chess, shogi and Go by self-play with AlphaZero. MuZero extended this to planning with a learned model without being given the rules, and AlphaStar reached grandmaster level in StarCraft II.65327
Silver also contributed to AlphaFold for protein structure prediction and AlphaProof for formal mathematical reasoning, and co-authored work on discovering reinforcement learning algorithms automatically. With Richard Sutton, Silver wrote the position papers "Reward is Enough" (2021, with Satinder Singh and Doina Precup) and "Welcome to the Era of Experience" (2025).689
Teaching
Silver's website hosts the materials for a 2015 Advanced Topics course on reinforcement learning (COMPM050/COMPGI13), including lecture slides, the Easy21 assignment and past exam questions, released under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.4
Work and contributions
AlphaZero Published research
First author of "Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm" (2017), which extends the AlphaGo Zero approach to chess and shogi.2
Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DQN) Published research
Co-author of the 2013 paper presenting a convolutional network trained with a variant of Q-learning to learn control policies for Atari 2600 games directly from pixels.3
Advanced Topics 2015: Reinforcement Learning (course) Published research
Published the lectures, Easy21 assignment and past exam questions of the 2015 Advanced Topics reinforcement learning course (COMPM050/COMPGI13), made available under CC-BY-NC 4.0 except for some third-party content.4
Timeline
- Published partially observable Monte-Carlo planning (POMCP) at NIPS 2010 from doctoral work at the University of Alberta.5
- Co-authored "Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning", which introduced deep Q-networks for Atari games.3
- Published the materials of the Advanced Topics 2015 course on reinforcement learning (COMPM050/COMPGI13).4
- Published AlphaGo in Nature, the first program to defeat a human professional Go player.56
- Posted the AlphaZero paper on mastering chess and shogi by self-play as first author.2
- Co-authored the Nature paper on AlphaStar reaching grandmaster level in StarCraft II.8
- Co-authored MuZero, which plans with a learned model in Atari, Go, chess and shogi.7
- Published "Reward is Enough" with Satinder Singh, Doina Precup and Richard Sutton.8
- Co-authored the Nature paper on AlphaProof's olympiad-level formal mathematical reasoning.8
- Wrote the position paper "Welcome to the Era of Experience" with Richard Sutton.89
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.
- Led the reinforcement learning team, DeepMind (Google DeepMind)1
Honors and recognition
- ACM Prize in Computing · Association for Computing Machinery6
- ACM Fellow · Association for Computing Machinery6
- Fellow of the Royal Society · Royal Society6
- Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal · Royal Academy of Engineering6
- Mensa Foundation Prize · Mensa Foundation6
- Fellow of the Academy of the Mathematical Sciences · Academy of the Mathematical Sciences6
Where they work
- Ineffable Intelligence 1 person in the wiki
- University College London 1 person in the wiki
Related people
- Nathan LambertReinforcement learning · Teaching and writing
- Denny BritzReinforcement learning · Teaching and writing
- Richard SuttonReinforcement learning · Teaching and writing
- Lilian WengTeaching and writing · Reinforcement learning
- Mark GurmanTeaching and writing
- Karen HaoTeaching and writing
- Kristian FagerlieTeaching and writing
- Noam BrownReinforcement learning
- Packy McCormickTeaching and writing
- Steven LevyTeaching and writing
Suggest a correction or removal
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References
9 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026
- David Silver — homepage (About)
- Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm (arXiv 1712.01815)
- Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning (arXiv 1312.5602)
- David Silver — Teaching (Advanced Topics 2015, Reinforcement Learning)
- David Silver — Research milestones
- David Silver — Bio
- Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model (arXiv 1911.08265)
- David Silver — Publications
- David Silver — Perspectives (position papers and talks)