Ineffable Intelligence Names Six Co-founders, Fortune Reports
David Silver has named six new Ineffable Intelligence co-founders, four of them from Google DeepMind, at a company that is ten months old and has no product. Three worked on AlphaStar with him. Fortune reported the hires, which the six confirmed by quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles.
September 7, 2026 – 11:37 pm
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Ineffable Intelligence has handed the title of co-founder to six people who did not found it. Four come from Google DeepMind, one from InstaDeep, and one from the Seattle venture firm that wrote the company’s first cheque. The London startup is ten months old, has no product, and carries a $5 billion valuation.
Jeremy Kahn reported the hires for Fortune on Monday, in a story the magazine ran as an exclusive. Ineffable confirmed them and declined to comment further. All six had updated their LinkedIn profiles to show the new roles, which is how the appointments became visible at all.
- Chris Apps
- Wojciech Czarnecki
- Lasse Espeholt
- Junhyuk Oh
- Alexandre Laterre
- Heather Gorham
The four from DeepMind are all veterans of AlphaStar, the system that reached grandmaster level at StarCraft II in 2019. Espeholt built weather models on Google’s MetNet. Ineffable is not assembling a general-purpose research staff. It is rebuilding one specific team from one specific era of DeepMind, the era before the lab reorganised itself around shipping Gemini.
That is the thesis made into an org chart. Silver argues that large language models cannot reach superintelligence, because they only ever recombine what humans have already written. His answer is reinforcement learning: agents that learn by acting inside simulated worlds and discovering things no human wrote down. Ineffable raised $1.1bn on that argument in April, the largest seed round Europe has recorded.
Oh will run reinforcement learning at Ineffable, and his recent work points somewhere specific. In October 2025 he was joint first author on a Nature paper that Silver also signed. The team used machine learning to discover a new reinforcement learning rule, rather than designing one by hand. They called it DiscoRL, and it beat every existing rule on the Atari benchmark.
The paper’s closing line is the part that matters commercially. The authors suggest that agents may soon find the algorithms for advanced AI themselves, out of their own experience. Researchers would stop writing them by hand. Every frontier lab is now chasing some version of that idea, usually filed under recursive self-improvement. Ineffable has hired one of the few people with a published result in it.
TNW has covered the neighbouring bets. Silver’s former colleague Richard Sutton left Keen in July to start his own reinforcement learning lab. Recursive Superintelligence raised $650mn in May to build AI that improves itself. The thesis is no longer eccentric. It is crowded.
An investor who joined the company, Gorham’s move is the odd one, and the best documented. GeekWire‘s John Cook told that story in April. She approached Silver in early 2024, after he published a paper arguing that knowledge drawn from human data was nearing its ceiling. Flying Fish wrote the first cheque roughly two years later.
Managing Director Frank Chang told GeekWire.