Turing Award winner Sutton launches Robot Self-Evolution Academy as HICOOL wraps with 10,209 startups
新智元 · wechat · 2026-08-29
The HICOOL 2026 Global Entrepreneurs Summit ran Aug 26-29 in Beijing with 10,209 startups from 141 countries and 13,472 founders competing for a prize pool over 110M RMB. At the closing ceremony, Richard Sutton, 2024 Turing Award winner and father of reinforcement learning, officially launched the Robot Self-Evolution Academy with HICOOL winner Tashan Technology, upgrading the "robot kindergarten" unveiled in June.
Sutton's approach runs counter to the mainstream LLM paradigm: he argues true intelligence can't come from human-labeled data, and robots should learn autonomously through real physical trial and error — using touch, not cameras or lidar, as the physical interface. Notable winners include Lizhi Intelligent (data + physics engine + training system, hundreds of millions RMB seed round) and Wange Zhiyuan's edge inference engine that runs 30B-parameter models on a 16GB laptop at one-fifth the energy of cloud. Over seven years the summit has produced 5 listed companies, 18 unicorns, and 71.9B RMB in post-award funding.
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