This is the entire breakthrough of deep learning on which the last two decades of productive AI research is based. Massive amounts of data are needed to generalize and prevent over-fitting. GP is suggesting an entirely new research paradigm will win out - as if researchers have not yet thought of "use less data".

> It really is the antithesis to the human brain, where it rewards specific knowledge

No, its completely analogous. The human brain has vast amounts of pre-training before it starts to learn knowledge specific to any kind of career or discipline, and this fact to me intuitively suggests why GP is baked: You cannot learn general concepts such as the english language, reasoning, computing, network communication, programming, relational data from a tiny dataset consisting only of code and documentation for one open-source framework and language.

It is all built on a massive tower of other concepts that must be understood first, including ones much more basic than the examples I mentioned but that are practically invisible to us because they have always been present as far back as our first memories can reach.