The Bobiverse books by Dennis E. Taylor touch upon this, as Bob is a human that becomes the AI in a replicant that is the intelligence behind a von Neumann probe sent out from earth. One of the ways that he maintains his sanity is to build a simulated VR environment to help maintain his sanity.
I personally think that the really hard part in creating an AGI is going to be training. As an adult human, one can look at an object and instantly know what its texture is going to feel like on one's fingers or even lips, how it will bounce and if it will shatter. How did we gain that knowledge? As babies we put absolutely everything we saw into our mouths and sucked or chewed on it. As kids we played for hours on end with all kinds of toys and household objects. Coming up with a way of training an AGI to be human level will be hard, as there is such a vast scope of knowledge in "common sense" that will be exceedingly difficult to implant into an AGI without the AGI having an ability to interact with the real world.
On the other hand, once that body of knowledge becomes an available training data set, evolution can take off at speeds otherwise impossible in the real world.