Richard Sutton
Also known as Richard S. Sutton, Rich Sutton
A founder of modern reinforcement learning, author of The Bitter Lesson; 2024 Turing Award with Andrew Barto.
At a glance
Roles
Google DeepMind (before)
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- Richard S.
- Sutton is an American-Canadian computer scientist, one of the founders of computational reinforcement learning, known for temporal-difference learning and policy-gradient methods.
- He shared the 2024 Turing Award with his doctoral supervisor Andrew Barto.
- He has been a professor at the University of Alberta since 2003 and is chief scientific advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.
- He was a distinguished research scientist at DeepMind from 2017 to 2023, then joined Keen Technologies, and in June 2026 founded Oak Lab with Khurram Javed.
- His 2019 essay The Bitter Lesson is widely cited.
Key facts
- Born
- 1957 or 1958, Toledo, Ohio1
- Current roles
- Founder and research scientist at Oak Lab, founded with Khurram Javed in June 2026; quarter-time professor of computing science, University of Alberta; chief scientific advisor, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii); pro-bono chief scientist, Openmind Research Institute2
- Education
- BA in psychology, Stanford (1978); MS (1980) and PhD (1984) in computer science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, supervised by Andrew Barto1
- Earlier
- GTE Laboratories from 1985 to 1994; AT&T Labs Shannon Laboratory from 1998 to 2002; professor at the University of Alberta from 20031
- DeepMind
- Distinguished research scientist from 2017 to 2023; helped launch DeepMind Alberta in Edmonton1
- Turing Award
- 2024, with Andrew Barto, for their work in reinforcement learning1
- The Bitter Lesson
- 2019 essay arguing that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run1
Roles
Before
Part of until 2023
Google DeepMind (distinguished research scientist; helped launch DeepMind Alberta) source on Google DeepMind
Links
Sources
Last checked against its sources today
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