[3] Richard Sutton was born in Ohio, and grew up in Oak Brook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

From 1985 to 1994, he was a principal member of technical staff in the Computer and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at GTE in Waltham, Massachusetts.

[3] From 1998 to 2002, Sutton worked at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory in Florham Park, New Jersey as principal technical staff member in the artificial intelligence department.

[6][3] While retaining his professorship, Sutton joined Deepmind in June 2017 as a distinguished research scientist and co-founder of its Edmonton office.

In a 2019 essay, Sutton criticized the field of AI research for failing "to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run", arguing that "70 years of AI research [had shown] that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin", beating efforts building on human knowledge about specific fields like computer vision, speech recognition, chess or Go.