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Point of order, evolution took a lot more than a billion years to arrive at generalised intelligence if you start it from first principals (ie abiogenesis), which seems like the most apt comparison to us starting from some sand and teaching it to count, then somehow inventing AGI.

Unicellular life emerged about 4 billion years ago.

FWIW, it then took about 2 billion years to come up with sexual reproduction, and then another half billion years to invent multicellular life, and then about 1.5 billion years to discover us.