ARC says intelligence emerges from learning when priors are minimised. Vertebrates disagree and have spent 500 million years proving the opposite.
The ARC Prize is a public competition with $2 million on the table, run by François Chollet (creator of Keras) and Mike Knoop (co-founder of Zapier). The premise is that current AI benchmarks measure what a model already knows, not how well it learns. Their fix is ARC-AGI, a series of reasoning tasks that are easy for humans and, so far, brutal for machines. Frontier models score below 4% on ARC-AGI-2.
The newest version, ARC-AGI-3, swaps static puzzles for interactive game environments where the agent has to figure out the rules by playing, with no instructions and no pre-loaded domain knowledge. Humans score 100%. AI scores under 1%. The gap demonstrates the point. Behind the gap is a philosophy about what intelligence is and where it comes from, and that philosophy is where the Primal Layers framework and ARC differ.
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