You are right. A neuromorphic hardware would be better. The reason right now is that everything runs on top of beam in Erlang, but then I am hoping that we can use Rust to implement core functions as NIFs as u/mardabx pointed out. https://discord.com/blog/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-million-concurrent-users

Having said that, I also do not think that speed is really the most critical problem to solve here. (For example, human brains are not even as fast as Beam single threads) Petaflots of compute is needed today because modern DL uses dense representations (unlike brain) and needs to be retrained from scratch (lacks continual learning). If resilient and fault tolerant system (say written in Erlang/Elixir) which could learn continuously and optimised (say using sparse representations) existed, it would eventually surpass competition.