person
David Silver
DeepMind principal research scientist; AlphaGo and AlphaZero
Led the AlphaGo and AlphaZero projects at DeepMind. Signatory to the Statement on AI Risk.
Profile
expertise
Frontier builder
Currently or recently led training, architecture, or safety work on a frontier model. Hands on the loss curve.
DeepMind principal scientist. Lead architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaStar. Deep RL pioneer.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Recognised universally in RL. Less mainstream press than Hassabis.
vintage
Deep-learning rise
Came up post-AlexNet. ImageNet, AlphaGo, transformer paper. DeepMind, Google Brain, FAIR establish the modern lab template.
DeepMind from 2010. AlphaGo 2016, AlphaZero 2017. Career is the deep-learning era.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Existential primacyendorses
Extinction/disempowerment risk overrides ordinary cost-benefitSignatory to the Statement on AI Risk.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with David Silver's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.