> I just didn't want to call it as "intelligent" and use this as basis for defining "intelligence." We can call them something else.
TL;DR We're also mostly brute forcing our way to discoveries. We're not that smart.
People too are relying on cultural handouts, maybe most of our intelligence is also "something else". Before electricity was discovered we had superstitious ideas about electrical phenomena. Before germ theory was discovered we were getting sick and dying like animals, helpless. Not so smart, even though it was a life and death situation for us.
It's easy to be "intelligent" when you're given the solutions beforehand by culture. ML learns from the same culture, like 99.99% of us who can't discover new things even to save our lives. And many of our discoveries are a gradual work of trial and error, we don't go directly to the target but stumble/brute force our way to it.
There was a news story recently title "Elegant Six-Page Proof Reveals the Emergence of Random Structure". The funny part is how the authors stumbled onto the amazing solution after many many unsuccessful trials by all the math community. Not a great sign of intelligence when you have to rely on chance so much and so many fail before one succeeds.
This tells me we're also mostly doing "something else". Intelligence means solving novel problems with few attempts, not spamming our attempts to death until something comes out. ML research looks more like spamming than intelligence too.
You know what else looks like spamming? Evolution. It's a blind search process brute forcing the problem of self replication for billions of years. It created us and everything else in one run but it's not very intelligent, it just spams a lot.