{"id":104449,"date":"2026-07-13T19:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/104449\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T19:00:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:00:13","slug":"turing-award-winner-rich-sutton-founds-oak-lab-to-build-ai-agents-that-learn-on-their-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/104449\/","title":{"rendered":"Turing Award winner Rich Sutton founds Oak Lab to build AI agents that learn on their own"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/author\/matthias-bastian\/\" class=\"w-6 h-6 relative rounded-full overflow-hidden shrink-0 bg-gray-400 block   exclude-from-pdf\" title=\"View all posts by Matthias Bastian\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Matthias Bastian\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/avatar_matthias_bastian.jpg\"  class=\"avatar avatar-24 photo w-6 h-6 left-0 top-0 absolute\" height=\"24\" width=\"24\" decoding=\"async\"\/>\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Richard Sutton, 2024 Turing Award winner and co-founder of modern reinforcement learning, has launched the startup Oak Lab in Toronto with Khurram Javed.\u00a0Both previously worked at John Carmack&#8217;s AI company Keen Technologies.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/RichardSSutton\/status\/2076663628301058329\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">Sutton calls<\/a> current deep learning methods &#8220;weak and inefficient&#8221; and says they &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>His recent statements hint at what he&#8217;s after. In June, he\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/turing-award-winner-richard-sutton-says-pure-generative-ai-cant-do-real-science\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">argued<\/a>\u00a0that generative AI is good at imitation but can&#8217;t evaluate its own outputs, making it incapable of real discovery. He wants to build AI agents that\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/the-next-leap-in-ai-depends-on-agents-that-learn-by-doing-not-just-by-reading-what-humans-wrote\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">learn continuously from their environment<\/a>, construct internal world models, and handle variation, evaluation, and selection on their own.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/oaklab.ai\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">Oak Lab<\/a>\u00a0is built around that idea. Like Keen, the company bets on reinforcement learning and the conviction that AI should learn from experience during operation\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/oaklab.ai\/posts\/learning-from-experience-instead-of-curated-datasets\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">rather than train once on static datasets<\/a>. The long-term goal is an agent with &#8220;a trillion parameters that learns and plans in real time with 20 watts of energy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\tAI News Without the Hype \u2013 Curated by Humans<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive &#8220;AI Radar&#8221; frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/the-decoder.com\/subscription\/\" class=\"inline-block text-white bg-(--heise-primary) mt-3 hover:bg-blue-800 focus:ring-4 focus:outline-none focus:ring-blue-300 font-medium rounded-sm w-full sm:w-auto  pl-3 pr-3 py-2.5 text-center newsletter-submit-button hover:no-underline\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe now\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Sutton, 2024 Turing Award winner and co-founder of modern reinforcement learning, has launched the startup Oak Lab&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,7537,54164,7567],"class_list":["post-104449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-oak-labs","tag-richard-sutton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}