I think the hard question is whether those wins can be realized with less effort than what we’re already doing, though.

What I mean is this: A brain today is obviously far more efficient at intelligence than our current approaches to AI. But a brain is a highly specialized chemical computer that evolved over hundreds of millions of years. That leaves a lot of room for inefficient and implausible strategies to play out! As long as wins are preserved, efficiency can improve this way anyway.

So the question is really, can we short cut that somehow?

It does seem like doing so would require a different approach. But so far all our other approaches to creating intelligence have been beaten by the big simple inefficient one. So it’s hard to see a path from here that doesn’t go that route.