Idk. I think the real tipping point is being able to succesfully use external memory so that you don't have to keep everything in your working memory when doing reasoning or solving problems.
Yes, humans have been around for 300,000 years and only in the last 10,000 years human crossed that tipping point to be able to think higher order things.
Do you have any evidence for this claim? Just because people didn’t start agriculture doesn’t mean they weren’t as smart as people today. Hell, 300000 years is nothing from an evolutionary perspective, they were for all practical purposes genetically identical.
It was just most probably a nurture thing — there was not as much accumulated knowledge to “bootstrap” a more advanced civilization (or perhaps, no will to do so. Why change when your system works just fine?). It’s not like Einstein could have achieved much back then without “standing on the shoulder of giants” before him.
That is basically what continuous learning is and so far everything I have seen is that it is discounted as not important or something you could easily work around. There is a difference between waiting for the next minor release which updates the weights based on whatever OpenAI gathered from your chat history and having the model update its weights as you query it.