These AI Tycoons Are Prepared to Share Their Wealth

David Silver is a sort-of billionaire. His investment in Ineffable Intelligence—the AI lab he established—is valued at an astonishing amount. However, he won’t personally profit from it; that’s how he arranged things.

From 2013 to 2025, Silver was a researcher at Google DeepMind, focusing on reinforcement learning, a technique used to train AI models with positive and negative feedback. He spearheaded the creation of AlphaGo in 2016, the first AI to defeat a human champion in the game of Go, recognized as a narrow form of superintelligence. In January, he departed to launch Ineffable Intelligence, believing that advances in reinforcement learning will bridge the cognitive divide between humans and machines.

Upon founding Ineffable Intelligence, Silver secured $1.1 billion from investors, achieving a $5.1 billion valuation—reportedly the largest seed round in Europe’s history. He also committed to donating any profits from future sales of his company to charitable causes.

“I was deeply contemplating what I could do to maximize my impact on the world,” Silver shares with WIRED during an interview at his office in Kings Cross, London, just around the corner from DeepMind’s headquarters. “Not solely through the work I perform, but also through the finances I generate along the way.”

He plans to determine how to allocate the funds once he sells his company, with the goal of saving as many lives as he can.

Silver joins a growing list of AI founders dedicating equity gains to charitable purposes. Notables like Mustafa Suleyman, a cofounder of DeepMind and currently the CEO of AI at Microsoft, as well as Anton Osika, founder of the automated coding platform Lovable, have made similar pledges. Should OpenAI and Anthropic go public as intended, creating numerous new millionaires, the AI sector may soon represent a significant portion of tech philanthropy.

However, with this new wave of techno-philanthropists comes a complex array of unresolved issues: Is philanthropy the best means to redistribute wealth? To what extent are major donors accountable for the problems they seek to address? Could commitments that scale with a company’s success justify unethical business practices or reckless growth? Is this instance any different from prior cycles of Silicon Valley philanthropy?

“You can’t really rely on capitalism to address issues caused by capitalist practices themselves … such as the intensification of extreme wealth concentration and vast inequalities,” asserts Linsey McGoey, sociology professor at the University of Essex and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “It’s akin to asking the arsonist to extinguish the fire he just ignited.”

Silver has formalized his charitable intentions through Founders Pledge, a nonprofit organization that assists entrepreneurs in distributing their wealth. Unlike the Giving Pledge, which is public but non-binding, Founders Pledge necessitates participants to sign a contract. “Choosing to make a binding pledge was crucial,” Silver remarks.

Founded in 2015, Founders Pledge has seen its valuation of recorded pledges skyrocket recently, rising from $400 million in 2023 to $4 billion this year so far. The AI industry now constitutes one-third of the total lifetime pledge amount.

According to cofounder David Goldberg, the organization aims to pinpoint “the most effective strategies to allocate capital at scale for improving the world.” It is often associated with effective altruism, which promotes wealth accumulation for charitable giving, reliance on data over emotions, and prioritizing causes likely to yield significant long-term impacts. However, despite these similarities, Goldberg does not endorse this comparison; Founders Pledge focuses on alleviating present human suffering. “We’re much more humanist,” he states.