Might kinda work if you gave it tools to do its research on the open internet, fiverr, mechanical Turk, etc.

Sure, it could up until some point where in order for it to figure out that it has to use a tool or access the Internet it will need more intelligence (to know that its answer or understanding is not sufficient or incorrect) How do we as humans know that? Someone tells us. Who's going to tell it? Then you end up at Minsky's Society of Mind, but also a distributed perpetual motion machine. Evolution seems to have figured out the intuition mechanism as some sort of probabilistic mechanism that's been honed for potentially millions of years, if not billions (white blood cells track pathogens, without having any neural network, so it's possible.) -- I think I opened a can of worms with these thoughts.

That’s at least some contact with reality, at least by proxy. I’m referring to a brain in a vat somehow learning.

On its own without any alignment or labelling. Super-intelligence or super-Grok?