Our entire approach to AI is built on a single, toxic commandment: Thou shalt not fail. We define a loss function and beat the model until it minimizes error. We punish mistakes. We scrap failed runs. We are building perfect, fragile, terrified students. But real intelligence, the kind that explores, creates, and adapts, isn’t born from the avoidance of failure. It’s born from a negotiated relationship with it. We have to grant our models The Permission of Failure.Imagine training an AI with a different core directive. Not “minimize error,” but “maximize interestingness of error.” Or “explore the spaces where your confidence is low.” This AI wouldn’t converge on a single right answer. It would become a pioneer of the adjacent possible, constantly poking at the boundaries of its own understanding, celebrating when it finds a glorious new way to be wrong. It would be a scientist, not a student cramming for a test.This is how evolution works. It’s a blind, stupid process that fails 99.9% of the time. But that 0.1% of non-failure is genius because the search space was so vast and unconstrained. Our current AI training is the opposite: a desperate, focused scramble to a local optimum. We’re getting really good answers to the questions we know how to ask, and no answers at all to the questions we’ve never imagined.We need to build sandboxes for glorious disaster. Zones where AIs can try to build perpetual motion machines, prove 1=2, or write screenplays where the protagonist is a melancholy black hole. The goal isn’t success. The goal is to see what the model does when all the normal rules are off. Its most profound insights will be buried in the wreckage of its most ambitious failures.My controversial take is this: The breakthrough to AGI will come from a research team that gets drunk one night and switches their model’s loss function from “accuracy” to “entertain me.” They’ll come back the next morning to find the AI has invented a new form of comedy, derived a bizarre but consistent new physics, and written a haunting opera about the life of a database entry. It will be useless, and beautiful, and brimming with a kind of raw, unoptimized creativity that looks an awful lot like a spark of real mind. We’re trying to build a perfect butler, when we should be trying to raise a brilliant, weird, and occasionally disastrous child.This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t just seek success—we must learn to throw a party for the magnificent, illuminating trash fire of failure. Subscribe now.