The chief scientific adviser at Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and senior fellow at CIFAR told The Logic the newly formed non-profit will officially launch in October. The open-source research organization will be focused on the “Alberta Plan” for AI research, a framework Sutton co-developed for studying continual reinforcement learning, where machines are taught to continuously learn. (The Logic)

Talking point: Sutton is the former leader of DeepMind Alberta, an outpost of Alphabet’s AI research lab that the tech giant shuttered in January as part of its mass layoffs. My colleague Jesse previously reported that Sutton had been eyeing launching his own Alberta-based venture—highlighting optimism in the region’s AI scene. “The purpose [of Open Mind Research] is to understand intelligence well enough to create it with technology,” Sutton said on the sidelines of a Creative Destruction Lab event in Toronto. Open Mind Research is currently a team of three, consisting of Melanie Marvin, who’s in charge of operations, and research scientist Joseph Modayil. Both Marvin and Modayil worked alongside Sutton at DeepMind Alberta.