TECH NEWS

The father of reinforcement learning is leaving Carmack to build his own AI

One of the most decorated minds in AI is striking out alone. Richard Sutton shared the 2024 Turing Award for founding modern reinforcement learning. On Monday he said he is leaving John Carmack’s startup Keen Technologies to start a new one, Oak Lab.

He announced it plainly on X. He praised Carmack and Keen, then said he and his collaborator Khurram Javed had “broken away to start our own startup” to chase “a slightly different path toward understanding intelligence.”

His diagnosis of the field is blunt. Current deep-learning methods, he wrote, are “weak and inefficient, and need not more tweaks, but fundamentally new ideas and a thorough reworking.”

Learning from experience, not datasets

Oak Lab’s core argument is about where intelligence comes from. Sutton has long held that it is created and maintained from run-time experience, not distilled from a clean, human-curated dataset.

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SEC settles fraud case against Adit Ventures over fake SpaceX and Klarna pre-IPO shares

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has settled fraud charges against private-fund adviser Adit Ventures Management LLC, its CEO Eric Munson, and three affiliated general partners, in a case that reads like a cautionary tale about the frenzy for pre-IPO shares in marquee names. The regulator alleges that between April

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An activist investor says the market has decided Lionsgate is an AI casualty. It wants the studio to prove otherwise or sell.

Activist investor Anson Funds is pressing Lionsgate to redefine itself for the AI era or put itself up for sale, according to a July letter to the board reviewed by Semafor. The argument turns on how the market reads a film library. “The rise of generative AI has led the

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Fei-Fei Li: the real risk of AI in classrooms is students who stop wanting to learn

TL;DR Fei-Fei Li says the worst outcome of AI in schools is not cheating but students losing agency and motivation. Warns equally against banning the tools. Says AI works best once a student is already engaged and stuck. Spoke on the Huberman Lab podcast, released Monday. Fei-Fei Li thinks

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Nvidia stopped funding the AI boom alone, Saudi banks cannot fund theirs, and 500 US towns have banned the buildings

TL;DR Nvidia has brought six private capital giants into a $500bn financing consortium after months of underwriting customers alone, Saudi Arabia’s data centre pipeline needs more debt than its banks can supply, and US local data centre bans passed 500 in July. Three developments in 48 hours point

Learning from experience, not datasets

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SEC settles fraud case against Adit Ventures over fake SpaceX and Klarna pre-IPO shares

An activist investor says the market has decided Lionsgate is an AI casualty. It wants the studio to prove otherwise or sell.

Fei-Fei Li: the real risk of AI in classrooms is students who stop wanting to learn

Nvidia stopped funding the AI boom alone, Saudi banks cannot fund theirs, and 500 US towns have banned the buildings