It's emulating a ridiculously simplified brain. Real brains have orders of magnitude more neurons, but beyond that they already have completely asynchronous evaluation of those neurons, as well as much more complicated connecting structure, as well as multiple methods of communicating with other neurons, some of which are incredibly subtle and hard to detect.

To really take AI to the next level I think you'd need a completely bespoke processor that can replicate those attributes in hardware, but it would be a very expensive gamble because you'd have no idea if it would work until you built it.