No doubt increased funding and interests will increase the odds of stumbling upon "cheap" strong AI - a faster-than-brute-force solution.
But consider the only strong intelligence we know: say intelligence only relied on the brain (which might well not be the case). This organ consumes a large fraction of the energy available to the individual. I'm not saying evolution produces optimal solutions but I guess its fair to say that a vastly superior algorithm would have had a good chance of concurring the world by now.
So imitating the biological processes of the brain in silicon would be rather costly no matter the gain. And that would in the end (at best) be a one-in-seven-billion individual ie. no magic powers.
I guess funding will flow towards practical systems that augument some consumer who will in the end provide a return on the investment.
Just saying we are not short on intelligence and its not likely to be cheap to run massive scale super-AI in silicon.
This is all very vague theorizing of course, but I believe that once we reach a level of artificial intelligence that resembles biological intelligence, scaling it will be quite feasible on a silicon platform. You've also removed the element of maintaining a body (exercise, eating, hygiene) as well as expanded potential interfaces (direct connection to the internet) so that even a 1:1 silicon brain would presumably be more efficient.
The next thing you can do is optimize the time step element, so that for every 1 second of thinking in a silicon brain, it has performed the equivalent of 10 seconds of thinking in a human brain. At that point, you've surpassed human intelligence. It's also safe to assume that if we do reach this point, we've learned a lot more about how biological intelligence works, and may be able to use to our advantage the beneficial intelligence properties of savants.
The really big downside with all these approaches is that the intelligence will be built from a blueprint that includes emotions, and we may do something that is very morally wrong towards the intelligence that we created.
