Nvidia has announced a partnership with an AI startup, just months after it was founded by a former top scientist at Google DeepMind.
Ineffable Intelligence, which is pursuing superintelligence and was founded in late 2025 by UCL professor and former lead of DeepMind’s reinforcement learning team, David Silver, will enter into an engineering-level collaboration with the chip giant to build “AI systems that learn by trial and error,” the company said on Wednesday.
The London-based company announced a record $1.1 billion seed round in April, co-led by U.S. venture capitalists Sequoia and Lightspeed, with participation from Nvidia, DST Global, Index, Google and the U.K.’s Sovereign AI Fund.
“The next frontier of AI is superlearners — systems that learn continuously from experience,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
He added: “We are thrilled to partner with Ineffable Intelligence to codesign the infrastructure for large-scale reinforcement learning as they push the frontier of AI and pioneer a new generation of intelligent systems.”
‘The next frontier of AI’
Unlike many leading AI models that are trained on human data, Ineffable Intelligence will focus on reinforcement learning, which is when AI models learn from experience.
“The system will train on rich forms of experience that are quite distinct from human language and other human data, and may require novel model architectures and training algorithms,” the company said.
David Silver. Credit: Peter Catchpole.
Nvidia and Ineffable will focus on building a pipeline that can feed reinforcement learning systems at scale, with engineers from both companies teaming up, it added. The work will use Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell chips, alongside its Vera Rubin platform.
“Researchers have largely solved the easier problem of AI: how to build systems that know all the things humans already know,” Silver said.
“But now we need to solve the harder problem of AI: how to build systems that discover new knowledge for themselves. That requires a very different approach — systems that learn from experience.”
Next-gen AI labs
Ineffable is one of several new AI labs set up by former top researchers at Big Tech companies to launch in recent months, with investors funneling billions into the ventures.
On Wednesday, a months-old startup called Recursive Superintelligence — founded by former Google DeepMind engineer Tim Rocktäschel — announced it had raised to $650 million. AMI Labs announced a $1 billion raise in March, months after its founder, Yann LeCun, announced he was leaving his role as Meta’s AI chief.
In the past year, former staff at OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic and xAI have also raised hundreds of millions from investors for months-old ventures, including AI labs Periodic Labs and Humans&.