> If AI researchers cared about scientific thinking, they would be intensely focused on the brains of bees.

Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described. The AI industrialists stopped caring 6 years ago once they realized LLMs seem to have been the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level.

There are plenty of pioneering scientists who are either returning to actual AI research (Yann Lecun, Ilya, etc), and plenty who never left (Richard Sutton) who are doing exactly what you are talking about.

> There is about 150 years of cognitive science experimentation in animals

Yeah that would be relevant if AI were an animal...

As I said, it's clearly intelligent, but a quite different intelligence to that shared by animals.