Turing Award Laureate Richard Sutton Launches Oak Lab to Challenge Today's Deep Learning Paradigm

Richard Sutton, the 2024 Turing Award winner widely regarded as a founding figure of reinforcement learning, has co-founded a new Toronto-based AI lab called Oak Lab that explicitly bets against the scaling-first approach dominating today's large language models. Sutton and his former student Khurram Javed unveiled the venture in mid-July 2026, framing it as a departure from the industry's reliance on ever-larger models trained on static datasets.