DeepMind

What if the biggest breakthrough in AI isn’t a better chatbot — but an AI that doesn’t need human knowledge at all? That’s the bet David Silver is making. The man who created AlphaGo just announced that his startup, Ineffable Intelligence, has raised a staggering $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation. It’s the largest seed round in European history, backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Google, and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund. ...

When the co-founder of the company that literally invented the Transformer admits a startup is beating them at coding, something seismic is happening. Sergey Brin wrote an internal memo to DeepMind staff last week that might as well have been a fire alarm: “To win the final sprint, we must urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution and turn our models into primary developers.” Google has now assembled a dedicated “strike team” within DeepMind to close a widening gap with Anthropic’s AI coding tools. And the details are more revealing than the headline. ...

The AI talent wars just opened a major new front. OpenAI announced Thursday that London will become its largest research hub outside the United States — a move that puts it on a direct collision course with Google DeepMind in one of the world’s richest pools of AI talent. This isn’t about opening a satellite office. It’s about who gets to build the future of AI, and where. From 30 Researchers to a Core Research Mandate OpenAI currently has about 30 researchers in London, a presence it established in 2023. The company won’t say how many new hires it plans or how much it’s investing. What it will say is that London researchers will “own key components of OpenAI’s frontier model development” — specifically safety, evaluation, alignment, and reliability. ...