Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) startup Ineffable Intelligence has selected Google Cloud as its exclusive infrastructure partner to develop the world’s first “superlearner”. The partnership comes hot on the heels of a $1.1bn (£860m) seed round announcement in April.
The deal, announced at the Google Cloud Summit in London this week, will result in the startup deploying one of the world’s largest clusters of Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs (A5X) to power research into systems that can discover knowledge through their own experience rather than human-provided datasets.
Ineffable Intelligence was founded by David Silver, the UCL professor and former Google DeepMind scientist who led the AlphaGo and AlphaZero projects. The company is aiming to bypass the “human data ceiling” that it said currently limits large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude.
April’s record-setting seed round – the largest in European history – values the London-based company at $5.1bn and includes backing from Sequoia, Lightspeed and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund.
Unlike traditional AI training which relies on static data, Ineffable’s “superlearner” is designed for experience-based learning where the model generates, evaluates and learns from its own actions in real time. This operational shift places fundamentally different demands on infrastructure and requires the high-performance networking and tightly integrated training systems such as those provided by Google’s AI Hypercomputer architecture.
According to David Silver, CEO and founder of Ineffable Intelligence, the decision to partner with Google Cloud was driven by the need for access to orchestrated hardware and software rather than just access to raw compute.
“We evaluated the space and chose Google Cloud as the best fit for our reinforcement learning infrastructure,” said Silver. “We aren’t just looking for processors; we are building a resilient and scalable environment to make ‘first contact’ with superintelligence – AI that transcends human limitations in science, mathematics and technology.”
The deployment utilises Google Cloud’s full-stack AI Hypercomputer, incorporating Jupiter networking and optimised storage to handle the massive computational scale required for reinforcement learning. This architecture moves away from standard “box of chips” provisioning to provide a systems-level optimisation that ensures researchers can focus on breakthroughs in autonomous learning rather than infrastructure bottlenecks.
The project further consolidates London as a critical global centre for frontier AI research, with the startup’s mission expected to attract premier engineering talent to the UK. The backing from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Sovereign AI Fund reflects a strategic move by the UK government to scale British-built technology that can generate new knowledge in medicine, engineering and science.
Industry observers have noted that Ineffable’s “anti-LLM” strategy represents a high-stakes scientific bet. While reinforcement learning proved successful in closed-system game environments like Go and StarCraft, applying trial-and-error algorithms to the vast complexity of human knowledge and scientific discovery remains an unproven frontier.
By bypassing human data avoids the inherent flaws and biases of engines designed for mimicry, the “superlearner” path may lack the immediate utility and predictability of current generative AI systems. The technical challenge of ensuring safety and ethical guardrails in a system that discovers knowledge independently of human input will be a big hurdle as the lab attempts to rediscover and then transcend human inventions.
In May, Ineffable Intelligence announced collaboration with Nvidia on the engineering requirements for its massive GPU cluster, to ensure the environment can scale to support the next generation of reinforcement learning algorithms. Silver believes this superlearning capability will eventually discover profound intellectual breakthroughs in language and mathematics.
The startup was founded in late 2025 and has become a cornerstone of Europe’s AI ecosystem.
