Comment by seanhunter

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I understand you, but what if the type of learning that leads to intelligence is inherently serial in some important way and can't just be parallelized? What if the fact that it takes a certain amount of chronological time is important? etc

What I'm trying to express is we seem to want to cherry pick certain features from nature but ignore others that are inconvenient and that is understandable, but currently because our knowledge of the biological systems is so incomplete we really don't know which (if any) of these features gives rise to intelligence. For all we know we could be doing training in a seemingly-efficient way that completely precludes intelligence actually emerging.