Richard Sutton
@RichardSSutton
Student of mind and nature, libertarian, chess player, cancer survivor. @ Keen, UAlberta, Amii, http://Openmindresearch.org, The Royal Society, Turing Award
AI researchers seek to understand intelligence well enough to create beings of greater intelligence than current humans. Reaching this profound intellectual milestone will enrich our economies and challenge our societal institutions. It will be unprecedented and…
The issue in the first paragraph is real when learning without bootstrapping (e.g., with reinforce). TD learning methods can already learn along the way and figure out what went well and what didn't if the value function has a good understanding of the world. This works even if…
Scaling up RL is all the rage right now, I had a chat with a friend about it yesterday. I'm fairly certain RL will continue to yield more intermediate gains, but I also don't expect it to be the full story. RL is basically "hey this happened to go well (/poorly), let me slightly…
True.
Intelligence is the ability to learn, adapt, reason, and solve problems. It’s process-oriented. Intelligence is not what you know — it’s what you can figure out. It’s the capacity to handle the unknown or novel situations. Intelligence = potential.
🚨The UK AISI identified four methodological flaws in AI "scheming" studies (deceptive alignment) conducted by Anthropic, MTER, Apollo Research, and others: "We call researchers studying AI 'scheming' to minimise their reliance on anecdotes, design research with appropriate…
The @UAlberta is ranked #1 in Canada for #AI. Amii is proud to be a key collaborator in building Alberta’s robust AI ecosystem, where ambitious AI ideas are born, nurtured, and actualized to make an impact. Read more: hubs.la/Q03vWLnp0
Go John!
I’ll be at @Caltech and @NASAJPL this week. I’m giving a talk on AI for the Mind—the quest ever thus! Reach out if you want to discuss how AI helps us understand the mind, or other topics like RL, naturalistic forms of computation, Openmind, or the Tour de France! 🚵
It turns out the Turing Award is actually a silvery bowl from Tiffanys.
In my recent talk at the Upperbound conference, I included a slide in which I tried to be a realist about the arrival of AI, setting aside what we might want to happen or what we might fear will happen, and just ask what _will_ happen (as in John Mearsheimer's "realist" school of…
The amount of death threats I’m receiving for speaking up on Gaza required me to file a police complaint. Here you can see a post in an Israelis in Los Angeles group. It says, “this rabies infected Nazi lives in Hollywood. If you go into X you will see him besmirch Israel and…
For an Israeli, the idea that our country could be committing genocide is almost impossible to accept. This isn’t about good or bad people—it’s about how we see the world, the story we've been raised to believe, the story that shapes our identity. From childhood, we learn that…
Can you help explain this to us non-Israelis
The U of A has been ranked the top university in Canada and 53rd in the world for artificial intelligence by U.S. News. Backed by world-leading experts, strong industry partnerships, and initiatives like the AI + Health Hub, the university is driving significant real-world…
Ah, if only I did have muscles like that...
Superheros gathered today at Creative Destruction Lab's "Super Session" for a deep-neural discussion on the future of AI ;> @creativedlab @rotmanschool @uoft @canada #ai #cdl
All the more so.
Dear Prof.Sutton, I recently bought one of your classic reinforcement learning book. But I would like to ask you, in the current era when deep reinforcement learning and large language models are prevalent, is it still necessary to read this book carefully?
In war, both sides lose. That we don’t learn this is the greatest tragedy.
This is what we have been up to at Keen
The video of my talk at Upper Bound 2025 is up: youtu.be/rQ-An5bhkrs?si…
Congratulations Sorina!
Thesis deposited! I poured my heart into this work, and now that it’s done, I miss it. This thesis was more than just a research project. It was a chance to chase ideas I believed in to change the world: – vision-based control and real-time learning – sending learning…
This i did not expect. Cool.
Perhaps the most important thing you can read about AI this year : “Welcome to the Era of Experience” This excellent paper from two senior DeepMind researchers argues that AI is entering a new phase—the "Era of Experience"—which follows the prior phases of simulation-based…
@RichardSSutton, a recipient of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award, is the 3rd speaker for our @NUSingapore (NUS) 120 Distinguished Speaker Series after Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio (x.com/bryanklow/stat…). I was really excited to be a moderator for his Q&A session: (a) Richard is…
Join us for the @NUSingapore 120 Distinguished Speaker Series with Prof. @RichardSSutton, a winner of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award. He's the 3rd speaker for our NUS120 Distinguished Speaker Series after @ylecun and @Yoshua_Bengio. Register now: eventbrite.sg/e/nus120-disti…
This is another excellent article explaining how the “AI Existential Risk” ecosystem, with over a billion dollars in funding from a few left-wing Effective Altruism billionaires, expanded to encompass hundreds of organizations: aipanic.news/p/the-doomers-…