I'm not comparing brain wetware to hardware. The parent's post was interested in how we achieved such great AI go performance today that was supposed to take 10 years. If you look at the components that fueled this, the performance of the system was advanced significantly by having additional hardware; both in training the policy and value networks with billions of synthetic Go games and at runtime.
I don't like the biological comparison, but using your metaphor it would be like God saying "Hey I've created a brain but only have 10 billion synapses. Evolution would normally take 10 years to get to human-scale at our current organic rate but if I throw money at building a bigger brain cavity I can squeeze in the 1 trillion to get there today!"
I don't like the biological comparison, but using your metaphor it would be like God saying "Hey I've created a brain but only have 10 billion synapses. Evolution would normally take 10 years to get to human-scale at our current organic rate but if I throw money at building a bigger brain cavity I can squeeze in the 1 trillion to get there today!"