Sutton criticizes LLM focus, announces founding of Oak Lab

In a report dated July 19, 2026, Sutton criticized the AI industry’s excessive reliance on large language models and said he had founded Oak Lab. The company reportedly aims to build a 1 trillion-parameter model using about 20 watts of power.

The significance is that Sutton has tied the founding of the company to a call to shift research and development away from today’s dominant approach, centered on data collected by humans, and toward autonomous learning through a cycle of action, observation and reward. Oak Lab’s goal is to run a large model that learns and plans in real time using about 20 watts, giving concrete form to Sutton’s concern about the power efficiency of conventional systems that move data around inside computers.