Once the "math is done" quite likely it would have paid off better than most investments for the top people to have spent a few short years working with grossly underpowered hardware until they could come up with amazing results there before scaling up. Rather than grossly overpowered hardware before there was even deep understanding of the underlying processes.
When you think about it, what we have seen from the latest ultra-high-powered "thinking" machines is truly so impressive. But if you are trying to fool somebody into believing that it's a real person it's still not "quite" there.
Maybe a good benchmark would be to take a regular PC, and without reliance on AI just pull out all the stops and put all the effort into fakery itself. No holds barred, any trick you can think of. See what the electronics is capable of this way. There are some smart engineers, this would only take a few years but looks like it would have been a lot more affordable.
Then with the same hardware if an AI alternative is not as convincing, something has got to be wrong.
It's good to find out this type of thing before you go overboard.
Regardless of speed or power, I never could have gotten an 8-bit computer to match the output of a 32-bit floating-point algorithm by using floating-point myself. Integers all the way and place the decimal where it's supposed to be when you're done.
Once it's really figured out, how do you think it would feel being the one paying the electric bills up until now?
