David Silver leads the reinforcement learning team at DeepMind. He is also a professor at University College London. David’s work focuses on artificially intelligent agents based on reinforcement learning. David led or co-led projects that played Atari games directly from pixels (Nature 2015), defeated a world champion in the game of Go (Nature 2016), learned by itself to defeat the world’s strongest chess, shogi and Go programs (Nature 2017, Science 2018), even without knowledge of the rules (Science 2020), defeated professional StarCraft players (Nature 2019). He also contributed to AlphaFold, the program that solved the protein folding problem (Nature 2020, Nature 2021), and AlphaProof, which achieved a medal in the international mathematics olympiad (2024). His work has been recognised by the ACM Prize in Computing, Marvin Minsky award, Mensa Foundation Prize, Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, ACM Fellowship and Royal Society Fellowship.