AI fear exaggerated: Turing Award winner Richard Sutton

Turing Award winner Richard Sutton challenged prevailing fears surrounding artificial intelligence, saying that "fear of AI is exaggerated and stoked by certain organizations and people that benefit from it", during his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 2025 Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai on Sept 11.

Sutton, widely known as one of the founding fathers of modern computational reinforcement learning, addressed the audience at the conference, focusing on scientific trends, political impacts, and the philosophical significance of AI.

Sutton argued that AI's reliance on human data is reaching its limits, hindering its ability to generate genuinely new knowledge and engage in continual learning.

He referenced a podcast by Dwarkesh Patel, an influential technology podcaster, who pointed out that large language models "don't get better over time the way a human would," highlighting the significant bottleneck caused by this lack of continual learning.

Sutton emphasized the importance of "The Era of Experience", where AI systems learn from their own interactions with the world, mirroring how humans and animals learn.

He cited AlphaGo's creative "move 37" and AlphaProof's silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad as examples of AI succeeding through experiential learning.

"Experience is the focus and foundation of all intelligence," he said.

The scientist believed that public fear of AI is partly driven by the fact that AI has become highly politicized, driving geopolitical competition and concern about bias, job displacement, and even human extinction.

Sutton proposed "decentralized cooperation" as a more sustainable and robust alternative to a common purpose, saying that "AI and human flourishing both come and could come from decentralized cooperation."

Sutton framed AI as the inevitable next step in the evolution of the universe. He outlined four tenets of realistic AI prognostication: a lack of global consensus, the eventual creation of true intelligence, the surpassing of current human intelligence, and the natural flow of power to the most intelligent agents.

"We should embrace it with courage, pride and a sense of adventure," Sutton said.

Luo Bin contributed to this story.