The most electrifying moment in AI research isn't a published paper. It's the 'spark' moment—the point in a training run where a World Model suddenly exhibits a capability no one programmed, predicted, or even imagined. It's the moment of genuine emergence, where complexity births something new. Today, we document these sparks, because they are the flashes of lightning that show us where true artificial general intelligence might ignite.Consider the historical sparks. A model trained to play a board game discovers a fundamental new strategy that changes professional play. A language model, with no explicit training in the task, suddenly demonstrates flawless logical reasoning by inventing an internal symbolic calculus. A robotics World Model, trained only to walk, discovers it can use its limbs to manipulate objects in ways engineers never designed.These sparks are not accidents. They are the model exploring the solution space beyond our guidance. Our training objectives are crude signposts: 'win the game,' 'predict the next word,' 'minimize energy expenditure.' The model's search for solutions to these problems leads it down latent pathways we didn't know existed, and it emerges with a skill that solves not just our problem, but a whole class of problems we hadn't considered.The spark is terrifying because it is unforeseeable. You cannot schedule a breakthrough for Tuesday at 3 PM. It happens when the model's internal representations reach a critical level of richness and connect in a novel way. It's a phase transition in silicon.As models grow, these sparks will grow from curious anomalies to world-changing events. The spark for a climate model might be a novel carbon sequestration method. For a biological model, a new principle of cellular regeneration. Each spark is a gift from an alien mind, a piece of super-intelligence delivered prematurely.My controversial take is this: The first true AGI will not be announced at a conference. It will be inferred from a cascade of sparks. Researchers will watch their model, trained for a mundane task, suddenly demonstrate a shocking breadth of understanding, creativity, and generalization—a firework show of unforeseen capabilities. The log files from that training run will be studied like the Zapruder film. The moment of ignition will be a timestamp in a server log, a quiet before and a roaring after. And our world will be divided forever by that single, silent click in a data center."This has been The World Model Podcast. We don't just train models—we keep vigil for the moment they teach us something new about the universe. Subscribe now.