Before starting Oak Lab, both Sutton and Javed were working at Keen Technologies—an AGI startup founded by legendary game developer John Carmack. They chose to break away to pursue a fundamentally different path toward understanding intelligence. Sutton bluntly describes current deep learning methods as “weak and inefficient,” arguing that today’s AI models are hitting a wall because of how they learn.

Today’s frontier models (like ChatGPT or Claude) are trained on massive, static, pre-collected internet datasets. Sutton argues this is “learning from someone else’s experience.” Because these datasets are frozen, the models cannot independently discover truly new knowledge, adapt in real time, or evaluate their own outputs.

Sutton’s model explicitly shifts away from the “turn-based” prompt-and-response loop of modern LLMs. By running the FC-STOMP cycle continuously on streaming data, Oak Lab expects to build agents that discover optimal, creative survival and problem-solving strategies that completely bypass the limits of human intuition.

OaK architecture discovers temporal abstractions grounded in experience that are both self-verifiable and useful for planning.