The foundation of every AI system on earth was laid by a teenage runaway from Detroit and a clerk from Madras. Neither of them could get hired today.

In 1935, a 12-year-old boy in Detroit ducked into a public library to hide from the kids chasing him. His father was a boiler-maker who used his fists. The neighborhood wasn’t any better. The boy had already taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics on his own. That night, hiding in the stacks, he found Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. He read all three volumes in three days. He found errors. He wrote Bertrand Russell a letter. Russell was so impressed he invited the boy to Cambridge. The boy couldn’t go. He was 12.

He ran away from home. He ended up in Chicago, where he met Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist who had the vision for how the brain might compute but needed someone who could do the math. McCulloch took the homeless boy in. They worked together every night. In 1943 they published “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” the first mathematical model of a neural network. Every AI system running today is built on that foundation. Walter Pitts’s only earned degree was an Associate of Arts. He died at 46.

Twenty years earlier, a clerk in Madras making 20 pounds a year wrote letters to several British mathematicians containing pages of original theorems he’d developed entirely on his own. Most ignored him. G.H. Hardy at Cambridge opened his, thought it was a hoax, then concluded the results “must be true, because if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.” Srinivasa Ramanujan became a Fellow of the Royal Society and the first Indian Fellow of Trinity College. He died at 32 from a treatable parasitic infection that was widespread in Madras and can lay dormant for years.

Institutions do phenomenal work. But the foundation of the field reshaping every industry on earth was laid by a teenage runaway and a clerk. You cannot regulate calculus. There will always be someone in a library, a garage, or a borrowed compute environment working on something no framework anticipated.

There are people out there right now working on problems the institutions have not yet named. Some of them are not waiting for permission. Some of them do not even know yet what they have found.

If we keep building frameworks around where we think the future comes from, we’re going to miss where it actually does.