"The program that provides the G in AGI is bound to be simple, because we know it is simple in humans, because we only differ slightly from chimpanzees. That thing that is causing the generality must be a relatively simple program, only a few K or only a few tens of K."
– David Deutsch to Sam Harris, on X, A YouTube video from June 18, 2025
David Deutsch refers to the human–bonobo difference as an 'idealized delta program'—the minimal code that transforms a chimp's mind into our own. Until recently, we assumed human uniqueness sprang from extra genomic 'code.' Yet new research shows we lost, rather than gained, critical sequences—suggesting that subtraction, not accretion, unlocked our distinct intelligence.
Pruning the genome—and the model
According to a study in Science by researchers at Yale and the Broad Institute 10,032 missing pieces of DNA — which are present in the genomes of other mammals — are missing in all humans. In other words: as little as 26 kb was pruned! (1)
Our ability to speak, create symphonies, and imagine the cosmos arises because 10,032 segments were removed—not appended—to the human genome. This deletion does not merely remove information—it frees and redirects existing elements to yield genuinely new functions. (2)
In AI, every compression method—pruning, quantization, distillation, tensor factorization—asks, 'What can we shed without loss of function?' The answer often reveals the core of what truly matters.
We need more systematic 'ablation' studies (removing components to see what remains). In biology this might mean targeted gene knockouts; in AI, it would be pruning, quantization and distillation (together and in this order), followed by performance audits.
Just as neural nets improve through pruning, societies accumulate conceptual debris—outdated laws, clickbait, conspiracy theories—until a cultural pruning becomes inevitable.
Fortunately, every era rediscovers its balance by stripping away the ephemera. The French Encyclopédie (3) stripped mystical rhetoric to clarify human rights and became the groundwork for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). The "divine right of kings" was over.
But who decides which ideas survive the pruning?
On‑device AI, running locally on each user's hardware, offers the answer. By moving the first layer of filtering out of centralized servers and into millions of individual devices, we crowdsource what "matters" in real time. Each user's model flags, upvotes, or refines raw insights—and this collective signal becomes the meta‑distiller's input. Only once the crowd has winnowed the noise do our algorithms perform the final, surgical subtraction.
If subtraction is understanding, and decentralization the way to choose what to subtract, then our next step is clear: strip away the noise—first by the crowd, then by our algorithms—and rediscover what truly matters.
Our challenge isn't building ever‑larger models—it's learning when to cut away the excess. In subtraction lies the next leap to true understanding.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
–– Antoine de Saint‑Exupéry
References:
1. 10,032 human-specific conserved deletions (hCONDELs) is approximately 26 kb (25,682 base pairs).
2. Even "simple" deletions can rewire gene regulation, reconfigure chromatin topology, or generate new protein architectures. With the lottery ticket hypothesis in AI, we can prune (remove) certain weights of the trained network and find a smaller network that works almost as well as the full network.
3. The Encyclopédie (Denis Diderot) is most famous for representing the thought of the Enlightenment: "to change the ways people think" (1751–1772).