Turing Award Winner Richard Sutton at WAIC 2026: 'AI Is Still Weak and Unreliable'

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:18:00 +0800

The main stage of WAIC 2026 in Shanghai on Friday hosted what felt like two different conversations about artificial intelligence — except both speakers were talking about the same thing.

The first was Richard Sutton, the 2024 Turing Award winner and one of the foundational figures in reinforcement learning. He didn’t hold back.

“Some people fear AI, and they also have reasons to exaggerate its importance — especially how fast it’s actually progressing,” he said.

Sutton’s central argument: the industry has been conflating intelligence with computation. “Most of what we call AI capability today is really computational capability. We need to separate these two definitions,” he said. Current AI systems, in his view, are mostly repackaging human knowledge rather than generating any of their own. “They’re weak in many aspects. There are still problems in their thinking processes. They are not that powerful.”

He went further, correcting a persistent industry misconception about the Turing Test. “Turing never used the term ‘Turing Test.’ He called it the imitation game,” Sutton said. The popular belief that Turing equated human-like behavior with machine intelligence, he argued, is a misreading.

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Turing Award Winner Richard Sutton at WAIC 2026: 'AI Is Still Weak and Unreliable'