I mean, if your hypothesis is that the human brain is the product of one billion years of evolution 'searching' for a configuration of neurons and synapses that is very efficient at sampling the environment, detect any changes, and act accordingly to increase likelihood of survival, and also communicate with other such configurations in order to devise and execute more complicated plans, then that...doesn't bode very well for current AI architectures, does it? Their training sessions are incredibly weak by comparison, simply learning to predict and interpolate some sparse dataset that some human brains produced.
If by 'there's no fundamental reason we can't jam together perceptrons this way' you mean that we can always throw a bunch of them into an ever-changing virtual world, let them mutate and multiply and after some long time fish out the survivors and have them work for us, sure, but we're talking about A LOT of compute here. Our hope is that we can find some sort of shortcut, because if we truly have to do it like evolution did, it probably won't happen this side of the millenium.
I have to say, this is completely the *opposite* of what i have gotten by playing around with those models(GPT4). At no point did I got the impression that I'm dealing with something that, had you taught it all humanity knew in the early 1800s about, say, electricity and magnetism, it would have learned 'deep representations' of those concepts to a degree that it would allow it to synthesize something truly novel, like prediction of electromagnetic waves.
I mean, the model has already digested most of what's written out there, what's the probability that something that has the ability to 'learn deep representations and learn to deploy those representations in arbitrary contexts' would have made zero contributions, drew zero new connections that had escaped humans, in something more serious that 'write an Avengers movie in the style of Shakespeare'? I'm not talking about something as big as electromagnetism but...something? Anything? It has 'grokked', as you say, pretty much the entirety of stack overflow, and yet I know of zero new programming techniques or design patterns or concepts it has come up with?