David Silver, the DeepMind researcher who built AlphaGo and watched it beat the world's best Go players back in 2016, has a new company and a pretty pointed opinion about where the AI industry is headed. The company is called Ineffable Intelligence, and its whole bet is on reinforcement learning, the approach where models figure things out through trial and error rather than by absorbing what humans have already written down.
His argument against the current LLM obsession is actually worth sitting with for a moment. Large language models, for all the hype, are essentially very sophisticated mirrors. They reflect human knowledge back at you. Silver thinks that ceiling is real, and that chasing superintelligence through better autocomplete is a dead end.
Silver is not some contrarian on a podcast. He helped create one of the most credible early demonstrations of AI doing something genuinely beyond human capability. When someone with that track record says the industry is on the wrong path, it deserves more than a scroll and a shrug.