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An elephant is probably close to the global optimum for turning plants into elephant protein. This is all evolution has optimized for billions and billions of years. It still takes 15-20 years to fully grow an elephant.
Given this example. Why would we expect ASI to industrially foom soon? The world economy is probably in complexity as great as turning plant matter into elephant tissue. Evolution is an ASI at turning dead matter into animals, and it still takes decades to fully grow the thing.