1977–, Computer scientist
David Silver is a British computer scientist who led the AlphaGo and AlphaZero programmes at DeepMind. The 2016 Nature paper Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search, which he led, describes the system that defeated 18-time world Go champion Lee Sedol 4–1 in March 2016 in Seoul. The 2017 Nature paper on AlphaGo Zero showed that the same architecture could learn from self-play alone, without human game data, achieving superhuman performance after three days of training. The 2018 paper on AlphaZero showed that the same algorithm, with no Go-specific knowledge, could master chess and shogi.
Silver was a doctoral student of Richard Sutton's at Alberta. He continued at DeepMind on the broader connection between reinforcement learning and intelligence, contributing to AlphaStar (StarCraft II), the MuZero paper (2019) extending AlphaZero to learn its own model of the environment, and the broader DeepMind reinforcement-learning research programme. He left Google DeepMind in January 2026 to found Ineffable Intelligence, a startup focused on the path to superintelligence via reinforcement learning.
Related people: Demis Hassabis, Richard Sutton
Works cited in this book:
- Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning (2015) (with Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Andrei A. Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin Riedmiller, Andreas K. Fidjeland, Georg Ostrovski, Stig Petersen, Charles Beattie, Amir Sadik, Ioannis Antonoglou, Helen King, Dharshan Kumaran, Daan Wierstra, Shane Legg, Demis Hassabis)
- Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search (2016) (with Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot, Sander Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel, Demis Hassabis)
- Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold (2021) (with John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Russ Bates, Augustin Žídek, Anna Potapenko, Alex Bridgland, Clemens Meyer, Simon A. A. Kohl, Andrew J. Ballard, Andrew Cowie, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Stanislav Nikolov, Rishub Jain, Jonas Adler, Trevor Back, Stig Petersen, David Reiman, Ellen Clancy, Michal Zielinski, Martin Steinegger, Michalina Pacholska, Tamas Berghammer, Sebastian Bodenstein, Oriol Vinyals, Andrew W. Senior, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Pushmeet Kohli, Demis Hassabis)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 1: What Is AI?, A Brief History of AI