Richard Sutton Founds Oak Lab to Tackle Autonomous Agents

RichardSSutton · x · 2026-07-13

Reinforcement learning pioneer Richard Sutton and Ken Javed have announced their departure from Keen to co-found the new company Oak Lab.

The startup aims to build general agents resembling animal intelligence based on the fully autonomous learning OaK architecture. This architecture does not rely on the passive feeding of human data; instead, it learns continuously through agent-environment interaction and its own experience. The team plans to build a complete architectural prototype in the coming years, with expected behavior closer to a human infant's first year of learning rather than current mainstream AI systems.

Related event: Turing Award Winner Sutton Leaves Keen to Found OakLab(10 posts)→

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