Sutton Leaves Keen to Found Oak Lab
anshulkundaje · x · 2026-07-14
Richard Sutton and Khurram Javed have left Keen to start a new venture, founding the startup Oak Lab.
Sutton's statements reflect his consistent research stance: they believe intelligence comes from and is sustained by runtime experience, rather than relying on massive web-based pre-training of language capabilities. He also argues that current deep learning methods are inefficient and brittle, requiring a fundamental rethink rather than minor patches.
Reposted comments mention that Oak Lab will focus on small, compute-efficient agents capable of learning in large worlds, emphasizing the advancement of research through "spontaneous abstraction" rather than "cheating with human language."
Related event: Turing Award Winner Sutton Leaves Keen to Found OakLab(10 posts)→
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