Tenured ML professors at the top 100 or so universities in the world aren't "most of us".

Too bad we're talking about AGI, not ML.

  Those jobs are incredibly hard to get,

You don't need to be a genius in order to land a hard-to-get job, and you thinking academia is somehow better at making the absolute smartest people rise to the top is cute.

  The fact that you think that John Carmack, because he's a name that you've actually heard of, is going to go into ML and suddenly make some giant advance that all the poor plebs in the field weren't able to do, is only a reflection of your misunderstanding of what's already happening in academia, not on Carmack's skills or abilities.

I don't think that. Mostly because we're not talking about ML, but also because I don't expect eureka moments from people that have been trying to solve a problem for a long time as much as I expect them from someone that hasn't properly tried their hand at it. Academia produces consistent results and consistent improvement. That's not what I'm looking for.

  You're acting as though everyone are just low level practitioners using sklearn, and it would be a great idea to have some smart people work on developing something novel. Guess what: that's already happening, with incredibly smart people, on an incredibly large scale. Carmack doing it would just be another drop in the bucket.

sklearn hardly seems relevant to AGI, so I'm not sure why I'd act like everyone in the AGI field merely a novice practitioner of it.