Because they aren't starting from nothing? They're starting from humans -- the more we can usefully encode about our knowledge of ourselves, the more time we can skip in evolutionary effort. The mutation rate is also rapidly accelerated and although we drop the fidelity in simulation, for the most part we can run magnitudes faster than real-time (and certainly if a limiting factor was human decision making time).

Life evolves at linear rates, while computers at geometric.

Even more to the point the cycle time for human evolution is at a minimum 14 years (biological limit to reproduce) and around 25 years (today's societal constraints). Whereas cycle time for new computer generations is what 12-18 months?

So at best every 14 years we get a new 'human model' with some random variations. Meanwhile in that time frame our computing hardware is 2000x improved (hopefully improvements in software accelerate that improvement further).

I don't think humans can beat the record, but technology? That's another matter all together.

Again our own consciousness wasn't created it emerged which means that we are a product of this emergence.

Flying took billions of years to evolve, but we created machines that fly faster than the speed of sound...