There was necessarily a "first reasoning being" who learned reasoning from scratch, and then it's improved from there. Humans needed tens of thousands of years because:
- humans experience reality at a slower pace than AI could theoretically experience a simulated reality
- humans have to transfer knowledge to the next generation every 80 years (in a manner that's very lossy), and around half of each human lifespan is spent learning things that the previous generation already knew
Whether the first reasoning entity is an individual organism or a group of organisms is completely irrelevant to the original point. If one were to grant that there was in fact a "first reasoning group" rather than a "first reasoning being" the original argument would remain intact.
- humans experience reality at a slower pace than AI could theoretically experience a simulated reality
- humans have to transfer knowledge to the next generation every 80 years (in a manner that's very lossy), and around half of each human lifespan is spent learning things that the previous generation already knew