thank you! Except the story doesn't involve the creation of a General AI, only a cognitive step - one of several along the way. Future stories could center around the limitations still present, and what additional steps might mean. Things get especially funky once you try to think of architectures that might support computation that surpasses the cognitive abilities of humans - not just in terms of a continuous speed/scale (that's easy) but in terms of a discrete thing - a type.

In that sense the story title is slightly misleading because the idea of a "step" implies a 1-D function that goes up suddenly, while my mental model of intelligence is more similar to a multi-dimensional space, where each axis is a type of computation. When you're putting things on faster hardware you're moving yourself upwards along all axes, but when you add a type of computation (e.g. Mystery module) you're introducing a new axis, capturing a wider volume of cognitive ability. In that sense the title is alluding to a cognitive step on the 1-D function of the total volume, not of any individual axis of it. Okay, maybe this needs vigorous hand-waving and/or a whiteboard to communicate properly, I'm sorry :)