Aug 18, 2026

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed discuss their radical vision for AI at Oak Lab, advocating for truly continual learning agents that learn from their own experience, rejecting synthetic data due to the "Big World Hypothesis," and outlining a path to overcome catastrophic forgetting with "continual backprop" for a trillion-parameter, self-maintaining mind, while critiquing LLMs as only a fraction of intelligence.

Sep 26, 2025

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

Richard Sutton, a foundational figure in reinforcement learning, argues that Large Language Models (LLMs) are a flawed paradigm for achieving true intelligence. He posits that LLMs are mimics of human-generated text, lacking genuine goals, world models, and the ability to learn continually from experience. Sutton advocates for a return to the principles of reinforcement learning, where an agent learns from the consequences of its actions in the real world, a method he believes is truly scalable and fundamental to all animal and human intelligence.