Richard Sutton

AI researchers seek to understand intelligence well enough to create beings of greater intelligence than current humans.

Reaching this profound intellectual milestone will enrich our economies and challenge our societal institutions. It will be unprecedented and transformational, but also a continuation of trends that are thousands of years old.

People have always created tools and been changed by them; this is what humans do.

The next big step is to understand ourselves.

This is a quest grand and glorious, and quintessentially human.

This Thursday I will be giving the opening keynote at RISEx 2026 in Edmonton

Title: The Tashan/Openmind Robot Kindergarten

Abstract: It has always been a dream in reinforcement learning to make robots that learn online by trial and error from their own experience. After all, this is the way people and all other animals learn about their bodies and the world. In robotics, however, learning is almost never online. Instead, the field has focused on learning from data-sets collected from human demonstrations. Learning from experience requires a totally different approach, including anti-fragile robots, skin with tactile sensing, extensive onboard computation, and continual real-time learning algorithms. All these things are difficult and so have rarely been done. They require a substantial commitment of engineering effort and resources, plus determination and patience, plus scientific breakthroughs in reinforcement learning algorithms. The Tashan/Openmind Robot Kindergarten is an ambitious new attempt to do all these things, led by researchers from the Openmind Research Institute in Edmonton and from the Tashan Technology Corporation in Beijing. The work has just begun, and so this talk will focus on the challenge and the ambition. Robots must learn online.

Brute force computation is not enough for intelligence. Clever new methods are needed. The science of AI is far from finished. IMHO

Abhishek Naik prepping RL for space

One reason I am sanguine about the technological singularity is that I have seen it coming for over 50 years. In 1975, when I was 17, I wrote:

"Before man can most effectively aid his problem solving machinery, he must first understand it. At present, his understanding is very poor. However, when the breakthrough in understanding the brain occurs, improvement will come very fast and in an exponential increase. Once man has created an intelligence greater than his own, that intelligence should be able to create an intelligence greater than itself, as man whose intelligence is less than its was able to create its intelligence. Thus, the level of intelligence will shoot up with incredible rapidity, probably within the space of years. Within a few years of a breakthrough, which may occur any time now, man will either have been left behind by a superior intelligence of his own making, which he can no longer understand, or he will have become that intelligence and will no longer be like anything imaginable today."