Richard Sutton, the 69-Year-Old Father of Reinforcement Learning, Launches Startup: Building a 20-Watt Human-Brain-Level Agent
Reinforcement Learning pioneer Richard Sutton, 69, has co-founded Oak Lab after departing Keen Technologies. The new venture aims to build a trillion-parameter intelligent agent capable of real-time learning and planning with a power consumption of only 20 watts, matching the human brain.
Sutton, a foundational figure in reinforcement learning and co-author of its seminal textbook, believes current deep learning approaches are inefficient and require a fundamental paradigm shift. Oak Lab's core thesis is that intelligence stems from runtime experience. The proposed OaK (Options and Knowledge) architecture seeks to enable agents to learn continuously from their own interactions, abstracting sequences of actions into reusable skills without storing or replaying past data batches.
This direction builds upon Sutton's long-held views, including those expressed in "The Bitter Lesson," and marks a move towards what he calls the "age of experience"—where AI learns from self-generated experience rather than static, human-curated datasets. Sutton's first public appearance following the launch will be at the Shanghai WAIC conference.
marsbit07/14 12:30
