Also, they'd have language that would be changing so fast we couldn't learn it.
I think the real AI is human society, not individual humans. We're just individual neurons in that network, taking information from other humans and propagating it. The fact that we die is how the AI garbage collects storage space. We had to invent our own storage cheap ways of propagation via writing, as the garbage collector constantly is coming for all of us. This way, data not useful to the AI swarm (what I ate for breakfast) doesn't have to be stored for very long before being freed up by the GC.
However, we could pause the AI simulation sometimes, and send in researchers to go over the data to what they learned, by first learning their propagation languages then by reading through likely millions of years of history and science to see what they've learned.
We could possibly give them a world like ours, with bodies like ours, but all stimulated, and see if they discover something useful for us, like lightspeed travel or something. The chances are pretty high though that we'd miss some essential rules and it wouldn't be applicable.
The idea though that we'd make a solo intelligence is bizarre. What would happen if you raised a human child alone for millions of years? They'd be insane and feral. This is what would happen if we could make an AI, it would likely run so fast it would have been trapped alone for millions of years by the time we say hello. Maybe it's trapped alone watching TV, but that doesn't mean it can speak.
Also what are its desires? Why would it have any interest in doing anything but watch TV forever?
We often forget that we're a huge host of competing desires. Our desire to interact is carefully balanced between cooperation and competition, sometimes bundled together so tightly we can't even unpack it.
AI is much harder than most people realize.