A.I. Pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Win the Turing Award

This year, the prestigious Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," has been awarded to two prominent A.I. researchers, Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton. They were recognized for their foundational work that has greatly influenced advancements in artificial intelligence technologies, including significant innovations like OpenAI's GPT.

Andrew Barto works at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, while Richard Sutton is a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. Together, they will share the $1 million prize, as announced on March 5.

The Turing Award is named after the British mathematician Alan Turing and is supported financially by Google (GOOGL) through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which presents the award annually. Notably, past recipients include renowned A.I. researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun, who won the Turing Award in 2018 for their groundbreaking contributions to artificial neural networks.

Barto and Sutton's award this year acknowledges their pivotal role in developing reinforcement learning techniques. This method is essential for refining how machines learn and adapt. According to Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, "Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in A.I. over the last several decades." He emphasized that the tools developed by Barto and Sutton are at the heart of current A.I. advancements and have drawn investment from various sectors, paving the way for countless new researchers.

The collaboration between Barto and Sutton began back in 1978 at UMass Amherst, where Barto was Sutton's Ph.D. advisor. They worked closely on many papers through the years, significantly shaping the algorithms and techniques that are now fundamental to reinforcement learning. They also published the influential textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction in 1998, which has been cited over 75,000 times and remains a key reference in the field.

Despite their impressive contributions to A.I., both researchers express caution regarding the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. Barto, reflecting on the state of the industry, stated to the Financial Times that "releasing software to millions of people without safeguards is not good engineering practice." He voices concerns that the push for quick commercialization should not come at the expense of safety and thorough testing.

Currently, Barto holds the title of professor emeritus of information and computer sciences at UMass Amherst. Sutton, on the other hand, teaches at the University of Alberta, serves as chief scientific advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and works as a research scientist at Keen Technologies, a company based in Dallas focused on A.I.

While Sutton shares concerns over the swift advancement of A.I., he has a more balanced perspective compared to fellow researchers like Hinton and Bengio, who have expressed strong worries about the potential existential risks posed by A.I. Sutton acknowledges the dangers of A.I. being applied in military contexts or spreading misinformation but believes that warnings can be exaggerated. He suggests that those who overly dramatize the dangers risk unfairly stigmatizing A.I. as a cause of global issues, stating, "Doomers are out of line and the concerns are overblown."

AI, Innovation, Research