Richard Sutton

@RichardSSutton73k followers

Student of mind and nature, libertarian, chess player, cancer survivor. @ , UAlberta, amii, , The Royal Society, Turing Award

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Oct 16

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Posts 91 posts

#	Date	Post	↓ Outlier	Views	Likes	Reposts	Bookmarks
1	Nov 18, '22	Stand with the people of Iran.	62.6×	0	12k	2.2k	38
2	Jan 27, '25	Free Palestine.	51.8×	788k	19k	1.7k	205
3	Sep 26, '25	@GaryMarcus @ylecun @demishassabis You were never alone, Gary, though you were the first to bite the bullet, to fight the good fight, and to make the argument well, again and again	43.8×	667k	1.2k	72	247
4	Sep 26, '25	Dwarkesh and I had a frank exchange of views. I hope we moved the conversation forward. Dwarkesh is a true gentleman.	43.2×	657k	3.5k	197	1.1k
5	May 6, '23	Lots of exaggeration about AI lately. The hype is that LLMs have anything to do with intelligence. The FUD is that AIs will enslave us. I like this cartoon in the New Yorker becaus	31.6×	481k	614	109	94
6	Sep 9, '23	We should prepare for, but not fear, the inevitable succession from humanity to AI, or so I argue in this talk pre-recorded for presentation at WAIC in Shanghai.	28.7×	438k	382	63	314
7	Sep 3, '25	Dwarkesh Patel is 100% right on this: AI's utility is very strongly dependent on continual learning.	28.6×	436k	1.5k	127	695
8	Jul 23, '23	There are a lot of things wrong with this world… but too much intelligence is not one of them.	22.4×	341k	2.9k	458	200
9	Sep 26, '25	@eigenrobot Even in birdsong learning in zebra finches the motor actions are not learned by imitation. The auditory result is reproduced, not the actions; in this crucial way it di	20.9×	317k	609	27	129
10	Jul 20, '23	AI researchers seek to understand intelligence well enough to create beings of greater intelligence than current humans. Reaching this profound intellectual milestone will enrich o	20.5×	311k	1.1k	166	239
11	Jan 14, '23	Blue laser eyes. I am laser focused on understanding intelligence, ignoring all the hype and FUD. (Bitcoin is pretty cool too)	18.7×	285k	688	55	45
12	Nov 24, '23	I agree 100%	18.3×	279k	562	33	94
13	Mar 5, '25	Machines that learn from experience were explored by Alan Turing almost eighty years ago, which makes it particularly gratifying and humbling to receive an award in his name for re	15×	228k	2.8k	334	267
14	Dec 27, '23	I've studied intelligence all my long life, yet still I feel I learned important things about intelligence by reading this book. Thank you, Max Bennett.	12.6×	191k	2k	201	2.1k
15	Sep 1, '25	My acceptance speech at the Turing award ceremony: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. The main idea of reinforcement learning is that a machine might discover what to do on its own	12.1×	185k	2.3k	222	555
16	Apr 11, '25	David Silver really hits it out of the park in this podcast. The paper "Welcome to the Era of Experience" is here: .	12.1×	184k	1k	185	737
17	Mar 3, '22	If you take all the fields that study intelligent decision making—from neuroscience to AI, psychology to control theory, economics to operations research—do their theories have muc	11.3×	0	1.5k	262	544
18	Oct 20, '25	To learn more about temporal difference learning, you could read the original paper () or watch this video ().	10.5×	160k	1.1k	116	1.1k
19	Jan 25, '23	It is sad to lose the DeepMind office in Edmonton to the Tech layoffs and looming recession. But AI is not going away, and I am more focused than ever on the Alberta Plan for AI re	9.8×	150k	712	72	146
20	Jun 19, '25	All the more so.	9.7×	148k	1.7k	131	703
21	Mar 27, '25	Modern Americans, you are not responsible for slavery. You are not responsible for stealing the land and killing almost all native Americans. Those things happened long ago, before	9.7×	147k	1.5k	189	201
22	Nov 24, '24	The original RL algorithms, inspired by natural learning, were online and incremental—they were streaming in the sense that they learned from each increment of experience as it hap	8.5×	130k	1.4k	226	876
23	Jun 7, '25	This i did not expect. Cool.	8.4×	127k	986	60	218
24	Jul 5, '25	It turns out the Turing Award is actually a silvery bowl from Tiffanys.	8.1×	123k	2.2k	98	111
25	Mar 7, '25	I am pretty happy with this 30-minute summary of my views on the current state of AI and alignment.	8.1×	123k	720	102	615
26	Feb 25, '25	"What we want is a machine that can learn from experience." ---Alan Turing, 1947	7.4×	112k	2.2k	280	257
27	Oct 22, '25	Learning is the derivative of knowledge.	7.2×	110k	1.6k	134	254
28	Sep 29, '22	The case for ambition in artificial intelligence research: Within your lifetime, AI researchers will understand the principles of intelligence—what it is and how it works—well enou	7.0×	0	1.1k	135	191
29	Apr 26, '22	A new pdf of Andy Barto's and my reinforcement learning textbook is released today. Only minor typo-like corrections. See .	6.9×	0	1k	180	255
30	Sep 27, '25	💯	6.7×	101k	653	46	213
31	Oct 20, '25	Well said	6.3×	96k	413	14	175
32	Jan 13, '23	Yi Wan will be my eighth PhD student to graduate this spring, and is on the job market now. His research speciality is RL algorithms that maximize the average reward per step. Such	6.3×	96k	340	13	58
33	Jul 19, '24	Marc Andreessen: I’ve DMed you.	6.0×	91k	289	10	25
34	Nov 5, '25	And the new Superintelligence Research Lab will be centered in... Edmonton!	5.8×	89k	416	26	104
35	Jul 5, '25	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 m	5.4×	83k	437	56	232
36	Apr 25, '25	My nuanced views on AI alignment are still often caricatured, so perhaps its a good time to repost this 15-minute talk in which I presented them directly: The short version is that	5.2×	79k	490	76	345
37	Sep 21, '25	For those really into it, here are another 50 minutes of my views on planning and action selection in options-based AI agents (like in the Oak architecture).	5.1×	78k	492	61	469
38	Aug 28, '24	If you are looking to conduct research full-time on the foundations of AI, and • you have read the RL textbook and done the exercises, • you agree with the Alberta Plan for AI Rese	5.1×	78k	508	66	278
39	Oct 14, '22	If you want others to care about what you think, then start by caring yourself. Get a notebook, write your thoughts down, challenge them, and develop them into something worth shar	5.1×	0	924	86	136
40	Feb 1, '24	Yes, the agent architectures that Yann LeCun and I work on are both instances of “the common model of the intelligent agent”. And it’s not just an AI thing. You can find the same i	5.0×	77k	462	70	306
41	Aug 18, '25	I was happy to give a more technical talk on how we might create an AI at RLC-2025 and AGI-2025 (video below). The Oak Architecture: A Vision of Super-Intelligence from Experience	4.3×	65k	675	101	502
42	Sep 30, '25	Still timely	4.2×	65k	526	47	100
43	Jul 21, '23	It has become commonplace to speak of the “existential risk” of AI. Recently even top AI scientists have begun to talk this way. I, for one, find it an unhelpful. So, without contr	4.1×	63k	182	31	30
44	Mar 31, '25	Rich's slogans for AI research (revised 2006): 1. Approximate the solution, not the problem (no special cases) 2. Drive from the problem 3. Take the agent’s point of view 4. Don’t	4.0×	61k	900	160	550
45	Jul 18, '24	The one-step trap (in AI research) The one-step trap is the common mistake of thinking that all or most of an AI agent’s learned predictions can be one-step ones, with all longer-t	3.9×	60k	509	64	377
46	Jan 22, '22	I kind of wish Geoff Hinton would write a brief article like this one by Claude Shannon in 1956:	3.5×	0	531	72	134
47	Jun 18, '25	In war, both sides lose. That we don’t learn this is the greatest tragedy.	3.5×	54k	867	71	38
48	Aug 29, '23	We finally have a version of our paper on loss of plasticity and continual backprop that is polished and submitted to a journal. Good work led by my PhD student Shibhansh Dohare.	3.4×	52k	290	50	130
49	Apr 22, '25	Everything new is also old. This from my 1984 PhD thesis: "AI is an experimental science, yet the complexity of its programs and problem domains often makes the interpretation of r	3.4×	52k	711	88	193
50	Jul 27, '25	My colleague Rupam Mahmood explains from first principles his groundbreaking work on Streaming Deep Reinforcement Learning:	3.3×	50k	397	50	369
51	Oct 14, '25	@kkkaaaaaappp Read the textbook.	3.2×	49k	689	44	49
52	Jun 22, '24	The PhD thesis of my 12th PhD student, Abhishek Naik, is now available. Title: Reinforcement Learning for Continuing Problems Using Average Reward Url: Abstract: This dissertation	3.2×	49k	372	27	169
53	Aug 25, '22	A draft of the Alberta Plan for AI Research came out today on arXiv. :-)	3.1×	0	431	91	111
54	Mar 31, '25	I’ve changed so little. From my 1978 Bachelor’s thesis: “The adult human mind is very complex, but the question remains open whether the learning processes that constructed it in i	3.1×	47k	535	63	143
55	Aug 15, '23	Last night we threw Yi Wan out of my research group (and today he started his travel to Seattle and Meta).	3.0×	46k	312	6	7
56	Nov 24, '23	@sprk_77 Not at all. The point of the bitter lesson is that the right learning algorithms (those that scale efficiently with massive computation) are exactly what we need. Massive	3.0×	45k	256	30	46
57	Feb 15, '25	The PhD thesis of my 14th PhD student, Khurram Javed (@KhurramJaved_96), is now available. Title: Real-time Reinforcement Learning for Achieving Goals in Big Worlds Url: Abstract:	2.9×	45k	474	45	212
58	Oct 11, '25	More on LLMs, RL, and the bitter lesson, on the Derby Mill podcast.	2.9×	45k	236	17	90
59	May 5, '24	Everything you know about the world is a belief about the statistics of your sensory input and how they depend on your output. There is nothing more to it, and understanding knowle	2.6×	40k	350	43	119
60	May 15, '22	My favorite conference is a small one: The Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making. It works best if only those with a genuine interest in cross	2.5×	0	474	44	57
61	Feb 2, '25	We have fun and talk about DeepSeek in the second episode of a new podcast on the frontier of AI and economic productivity organized by the great @professor_ajay. Check it out.	2.5×	37k	333	46	178
62	Jan 7, '22	DeepMind Alberta is hiring research scientists this year. Come join us in understanding and creating interactive, playful AI.	2.4×	0	398	65	57
63	Nov 3, '24	Fans of The Bitter Lesson may be interested in this talk from 2018 (recently re-discovered) which includes its first public presentation, at 30:40.	2.3×	35k	344	54	230
64	Apr 4, '25	The PhD thesis of my _first_ PhD student, Doina Precup, is at-long-last available in digital form. Title: Temporal Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning Url: Abstract: Decision mak	2.3×	35k	491	48	202
65	Jun 17, '25	This is what we have been up to at Keen	2.2×	34k	213	11	75
66	Oct 7, '25	@beforeasi @dwarkesh_sp Yeah, I misspoke there. I meant to say that I don’t think learning is about training. Learning is something that the agent does, whereas training is somet	2.2×	33k	410	17	29
67	Sep 3, '25	The Pandemonium paper is seminal, but a little hard to find; here is a pdf:	2.1×	31k	248	25	265
68	Sep 14, '24	The PhD thesis of my 13th PhD student, Kris De Asis (@M33pinator), is now available. Title: Explorations in the Foundations of Value-based Reinforcement Learning Url: Abstract: Val	2.0×	31k	241	16	93
69	Apr 17, '25	This thread in Chinese does indeed seem to accurately communicate the main points of David Silver’s and my short paper on the Era of Experience. Thanks @AnneXingxb!	2.0×	30k	265	40	114
70	Dec 26, '21	Levels of explanation. Level 1 is physics. Level 2 is biology/evolution. Level 3 is the mind. (I study level 3.) Level 4 is the economy. Is there a level 5?	2.0×	0	300	22	53
71	Jul 19, '24	Artificial Agency is led by my former students and colleagues---people I know well. They are the best in the world at using reinforcement learning and foundation models to create c	1.9×	29k	193	12	48
72	Jan 9, '22	I was thinking about how fractious AI research is. This sentence from Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962) is apropos and succinct: “History suggests that the ro	1.9×	0	358	39	37
73	Apr 11, '25	@dsivakumar The short paper "Welcome to the Era of Experience" is literally just released, like this week. Ultimately it will become a chapter in the book 'Designing an Intelligenc	1.8×	28k	254	51	127
74	Feb 20, '24	My tenth PhD student, Banafsheh Rafiee, just defended her thesis “State Construction in Reinforcement Learning”, in which she introduced three diagnostic testbeds based on animal l	1.8×	27k	196	15	53
75	May 9, '25	True dat	1.8×	27k	322	20	33
76	Oct 29, '22	I have just completed my NSERC Discovery Grant proposal, describing the research I'd like to do for the next five years. It can be read at . FYI.	1.7×	0	242	29	85
77	Aug 29, '22	I recently gave a keynote talk at an exciting new conference: CoLLAs, the conference on life-long learning agents. My talk was on Maintaining Plasticity in Deep Continual Learning,	1.7×	0	256	34	64
78	May 13, '25	In 1993, it was looking like the internet was actually going to be a thing, so I made a homepage for myself. This is what I wrote for my personal statement: "I am seeking to identi	1.7×	25k	433	42	106
79	Mar 7, '25	Geordie Rose taking the bullet of explaining away consciousness for those who think it is a special thing. Good solid work, but not very rewarding. I salute you.	1.6×	25k	149	11	65
80	May 31, '25	ACM has made an excellent video introduction to reinforcement learning!	1.6×	24k	305	41	106
81	Apr 3, '22	I am proud to announce the graduation of my sixth PhD student. Sina Ghiassian is an expert in the design and empirical study of off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms. Reach	1.5×	0	354	16	10
82	May 6, '25	The latest episode of the Derby Mill Podcast is just out and focused on the "Era of Experience" paper by David Silver and myself. Substack: Spotify: Apple: YouTube:	1.5×	23k	202	47	103
83	Oct 25, '22	Intelligence is the computational part of an agent’s ability to learn to predict and control its input stream (particularly its reward) in interaction with its environment.	1.5×	0	252	34	38
84	Apr 2, '25	The research team at Openmind now consists of one director and four fellows. With no fanfare and no hype, they go about researching AI exactly how they think will be most productiv	1.3×	20k	261	17	92
85	Oct 16, '22	AIs can serve us as tools, but eventually, when they are sufficiently advanced, it may become immoral to keep them subservient. What is a practical criterion for deciding when an A	1.3×	0	176	17	21
86	May 28, '22	Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to predict and control a sensory input stream. Adapted from John McCarthy's 1997 definition, see	1.3×	0	204	31	41
87	Jun 27, '25	Ah, if only I did have muscles like that...	1.3×	19k	159	5	9
88	Nov 18, '24	“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.” —H. G. Wells, The Time Machine	1.2×	18k	316	48	66
89	Sep 17, '22	When there is a war, both sides have failed.	1.2×	0	228	14	7
90	Aug 24, '24	A year later and our work on Loss of Plasticity is finally published, in Nature no less! The Nature version is totally rewritten and has many new results: Congratulations to the au	1.1×	17k	193	25	57
91	Dec 21, '21	The special thing about life is that it has a now.	1.1×	0	231	16	9
92	Sep 3, '24	Andy Barto gave a great talk, and Ida is doing a great job relaying it!	1.0×	15k	147	16	42
93	Oct 12, '22	A video of my talk on the Alberta Plan for AI Research is now available:	1.0×	0	162	25	31
94	Sep 29, '22	It will be the greatest intellectual achievement of all time. An achievement of science, of engineering, and of the humanities, whose significance is beyond humanity, beyond life,	0.9×	0	147	11	5
95	Mar 31, '25	Neural networks already seemed old to me in 1978: “A common way to develop general theories of the brain is to theorize about the neuron as the fundamental building block. Frequent	0.9×	13k	174	15	49
96	Sep 29, '22	I call it the Prize. The Prize is a great and glorious goal! Ambitious AI researchers should keep their Eyes on the Prize.	0.9×	0	170	5	8
97	Nov 15, '24	"In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer, philosopher	0.9×	13k	247	29	48
98	Oct 14, '22	Honoring Your Thoughts To write is to begin to think. To write in a special place ---a book such as this--- is to honor your thoughts and to help them build, one upon the other.	0.8×	0	162	11	15
99	Aug 22, '24	Yesterday there was a completely-student-organized summit of the RLAI (Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence) research group at the University of Alberta, held at the	0.8×	12k	176	18	7
100	May 27, '22	In the end, Amii's AI week was awesome. #aiweek2022 So much science. So much industry. So much education. So much fun.	0.7×	0	146	14	4

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