Turing Award goes to Barto and Sutton for reinforcement learning

The Association for Computing Machinery named Andrew Barto and Richard S. Sutton, once advisor and student, recipients of the 2024 A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. The $1 million prize is funded by Google.

Why it mattered Reinforcement learning underpins the instruction-tuning and reasoning methods used across the year’s frontier models, including the training behind DeepSeek’s R1.