The limit is high quality data, not compute.
There are no perpetual motion machines.
Humans certainly did. We did not inherit our physics and poetry books from some aliens.
LLMs can not reason - many people seen to believe that they can.
My understanding is that the whole point of R1 is that it was surprisingly effective to train on synthetic data AND to reinforce on the output rather than the whole chain of thought. Which does not require so much human-curated data and is a big part of where the efficiency gain came from.
If, as some companies claim, these models truly possess emergent reasoning, their ability to handle imperfect data should serve as a proof of that capability.