> It's absolutely fantastic that < 100 years of purposeful hardware research and < 1 year of training can compete with 3 billion years of meandering hardware building and 16 years of training, to the point that the latter feels the need to insist that the former will never be as good.

The 3 billion years of evolution are still at the foundation of computer research. It's not like computers are spontaneously appearing out of thin vacuum via quantum fluctuations.