Ya I don't like how we are biased for machines being absolutely perfect or useless. If an AI system can't do something in a few hours that takes humans years to learn or think about, it's considered a failure. Humans spend many weeks, sometimes years on things, not to mention all the time up to that point they spent learning about the world or working on similar problems.

On the other hand most algorithms will quickly plateau and not make much progress afterwards. Machine learning algorithms are nowhere near the ability of human brains and letting them run for 4 years wouldn't be much different than running them for a few weeks. (Also time on a supercomputer isn't cheap.)