What is this general intelligence of which you speak? The things that we generally regard as people are essentially language models that run on meat hardware with a lizard-monkey operating system. Sapir-whorf/linguistic relativity more or less demonstrates that "we" are products of language - our rational thought generally operates in the language layer. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck - then you've got yourself a duck.

To be honest, perhaps the language model works better without the evolutionary baggage.

That isn't to discount the other things we can do with our neural nets - for instance, it is possible to think without language - see music, instantaneous mental arithmetic, intuition - but these are essentially independent specialised models that we run on the same hardware that our language model can interrogate. We train these models from birth.

Whether intentional or not, AI research is very much going in the direction of replicating the human mind.