These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes

He specialized in reinforcement learning, a method of teaching an AI model through positive and negative feedback. 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.

He also vowed to donate all the money he makes from any future sale of his company to charity. 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.

What Happened

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.

• Between 2013 and 2025, Silver worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind.

• 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.

• 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.

Key Details

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. Along with a new generation of techno-philanthropists, though, comes a tangle.

• Founders Pledge has been around since 2015.

• But the value of pledges recorded by the nonprofit has soared recently, from $400 million in 2023 to $4 billion so far this year.

• The Gates Foundation—the most famous embodiment of techno-philanthropy—has given away more than $100 billion to causes targeting poverty and disease in the 25 years since it was founded by Bill and Melinda Gates.

Why It Matters

To what degree are megadonors responsible for some of the problems they aim to fix? Could a pledge that scales with a company’s success come to justify unsavory business practices or reckless accelerationism?

• Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged to donate their $200 billion fortune to scientific research through their own foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

• The WHO itself has acknowledged issues with its financing, and in 2022 it put forth a new model designed to address some of those concerns.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• “It’s not right for a private philanthropy to be one of the largest funders of multinational global health efforts,” he said in 2023, noting that the foundation had become the WHO’s second-largest donor.

• In 2024, the one-time crypto kingpin and effective altruism poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud.

• Continued reporting by WIRED as more details emerge