Why Karl Friston is betting on cultivating curiosity for sustainable AGI

The ARC-AGI-3 challenge, which launches today, is the first interactive reasoning benchmark designed to expose what Large Language Models (LLMs) fundamentally cannot do: explore, form hypotheses, and learn from uncertainty. Current frontier AI models score zero on the preview. Humans solve the same puzzles in minutes. The gap tells you something important about what is missing from the dominant AI paradigm.

That gap is the territory Karl Friston, Chief Scientist at VERSES AI, a small Canadian cognitive computing company, has been working in for decades. Friston is one of the most cited neuroscientists alive, and his work on active inference, a mathematical framework for how brains make sense of the world by encoding and reducing uncertainty, has become the dominant paradigm in computational neuroscience. Now he and his team are building toward demonstrating that this framework can compete with approaches backed by billions of dollars in compute. Friston says of ...