Richard S. Sutton

Richard Stuart Sutton (born 1957 or 1958) is a Canadian computer scientist. He is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta and chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. In 2026, he co-founded the AI startup Oak Lab. Sutton is considered one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning, known for his contributions to temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods. He also proposed the "bitter lesson", an influential observation about AI scaling limits. In 2024, Sutton received the Turing Award alongside his supervisor Andrew Barto for their work in reinforcement learning.