Who is betting on what in AI, and against whom.
Richard Sutton
Researcher
Turing Award 2024
Co-author of the standard reinforcement-learning textbook and 2024 Turing laureate. Wrote The Bitter Lesson. Argues that intelligence is continual learning from a reward stream and that current deep learning cannot do it. Founded Oak Lab in Toronto in July 2026 after three years at Keen.
Known for Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction; The Bitter Lesson; Temporal-difference learning; The Alberta Plan
Argues for
Experience / RL Intelligence comes from an agent's own stream of experience, not from a fixed corpus of human text.
Works in
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Jul 2026 – nowOak Lab, Co-founderSources AI pioneer Richard Sutton founds new research lab BetaKit 2026-07-14 · Rich Sutton founds Oak Lab to build AI agents that learn on their own The Decoder 2026-07-13
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2003 – nowAmii / University of Alberta, Professor, University of Alberta; chief scientific advisor, Amii
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Sep 2023 – Jul 2026Keen Technologies, Research scientist
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Jul 2017 – Jan 2023Google DeepMind, Distinguished research scientist, DeepMind Alberta