Humanity did exactly that though, so an AGI should be capable of the same feat given enough time.

There is the concept of n-t-AGI, which is capable of performing tasks that would take n humans t time. So a single AI system that is capable of rediscovering much of science from basic principles could be classified as something like 10'000'000humans-2500years-AGI, which could already be reasonably considered artificial superintelligence.

> Humanity did exactly that though

No, it mostly didn't, it continued (continues, as every human is continuously interlacing “training” and “inferencing”) training on large volumes of ground truth for a very long time, including both natural and synthetic data; it didn't reason everything beyond some basic training on first principles.

At a minimum, something that looks broadly like one of today's AI models would need either a method of continuously finetuning its own weights with a suitable evaluation function or,if it was going to rely on in-context learning, would need many orders of magnitude larger context, than any model today.

And that's not a “this is enough to likely work” thing, but “this is the minimum for the their to even be a plausible mechnanism to incorporate the information necessary for it to work” one.

Humanity did it through A LOT of collective trial and error. Evolution is a powerful algorithm, but not a very smart one.

Billions of humans did that over hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe it would only take thousands of years for AGI?