These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes
A new generation of philanthropists made rich by artificial intelligence are preparing to give away their vast wealth. What should we make of a multi-billion-dollar pinky promise?
David Silver is a billionaire, sort of. His stake in Ineffable Intelligence —the artificial intelligence lab he founded—is worth an ungodly fortune. But he stands to collect none of that money himself. He set things up that way.
Between 2013 and 2025, Silver worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind. He specialized in reinforcement learning, a method of teaching an AI model through positive and negative feedback. In 2016, he led the development of AlphaGo, which became the first AI to defeat a human champion in the game of Go and was heralded as a narrow form of superintelligence . Silver left to start Ineffable Intelligence in January, betting that reinforcement learning breakthroughs will close the gap between human and machine cognition across the board.
When he started Ineffable Intelligence, Silver raised $1.1 billion from investors at a $5.1 billion valuation, reportedly the largest seed round in Europe’s history . He also vowed to donate all the money he makes from any future sale of his company to charity.
“I was thinking very deeply about what I could do to have the maximum impact on the world,” Silver tells WIRED in an interview at his office in Kings Cross, London, around the corner from DeepMind’s headquarters. “Not just through the work I do, but through the finance I arrive at in the process.”
He’ll choose how to deploy the funds after he sells his company, he says, but his ambition is to save as many lives as possible.
Silver is the latest in a growing line of AI founders to pledge equity proceeds to charity. Others include Mustafa Suleyman , a DeepMind cofounder and the CEO of AI at Microsoft, and Anton Osika , the founder of automated coding platform Lovable. If OpenAI and Anthropic go public as planned, minting thousands of new millionaires in the process, the AI industry could soon come to represent an increasingly outsize proportion of tech philanthropy .
