So are you saying that we need not build bigger networks with huge data, but rather have better algorithms with significant parallelization? Sounds like we're back to symbolic AI again!
New computing architectures like quantum computing could simulate these systems far more efficiently than classical architectures -- in theory. The engineering still needs more work though.
Also, new AI techniques are good at finding good enough equivalents to exactly replicating human cognition for many things, but that might get harder as the problems become even more general.
