Turing Award winner Rich Sutton founds Oak Lab to build AI agents that learn on their own

Richard Sutton, 2024 Turing Award winner and co-founder of modern reinforcement learning, has launched the startup Oak Lab in Toronto with Khurram Javed. Both previously worked at John Carmack’s AI company Keen Technologies. Sutton calls current deep learning methods “weak and inefficient” and says they “need not more tweaks, but fundamentally new ideas and a thorough reworking before they can provide a solid foundation for achieving the more ambitious goals of AI.”

His recent statements hint at what he’s after. In June, he argued that generative AI is good at imitation but can’t evaluate its own outputs, making it incapable of real discovery. He wants to build AI agents that learn continuously from their environment, construct internal world models, and handle variation, evaluation, and selection on their own. Oak Lab is built around that idea. Like Keen, the company bets on reinforcement learning and the conviction that AI should learn from experience during operation rather than train once on static datasets. The long-term goal is an agent with “a trillion parameters that learns and plans in real time with 20 watts of energy.”