“The world already has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of really talented researchers all pursuing exactly the same approach… Am I going to be the 100,001 person that's pursuing that approach? … There's this other lamppost that right now no one is looking under.”
Training Data · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Asked why he left DeepMind to start a new lab instead of running the work there, Silver says his path to superintelligence doesn't go through LLM products. The crowd, he says, is all doubling down on pre-training and post-training LLMs.
Transcript
…the right scale, that a lot of things which seem like incredibly hard or like they might be very slow, that once you've kind of experienced enough data, that after that, the things that were slow can become very fast. I think that's a lesson that wasn't obvious to me in advance until it happened.
Okay, we're going to come back to that later. You could have run this program inside DeepMind, where, you know, could have probably had more access to compute than just about anybody. You decided the right thing to do was to start a new lab. Why did you do that?
…I realized that I felt that so passionately that this deserved to be more than just the corner of an organization that's focused on LLM-based products and deserved to be represented by an elite AI lab that really just gives this approach its all and represents it 100%. And once I realized that, it felt very natural to create this company. I suppose another way to look at it is that. You know, the world already has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of really talented researchers all pursuing exactly the same approach, like really just kind of doubling down on LLMs with pre-training, post-training, you know, coding and that kind of LLM path. Am I going to be the 100,001 person that's like pursuing that approach? Is that the most effective use of my time and my energy? And in the end, I realized that there's this other lamppost that right now no one is looking under, and where if I actually put my effort…
company name that couldn't go to waste.
That's right. You're going to say where
the mind's called ineffable.
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