[karmakaze]

That's one way to look at it.

What's described there is the predicting patterns, which is a part of intelligence but there's much more to discover and invent. Even within the 'optimization' task there's huge differences in the leaps from NNs to DNNs and from DNNs to AlphaGo/Zero. The details are what make it interesting.

If we were to understand exactly how the brain operates and learns, we'd see that it's solved/solving just an optimization problem, but that doesn't make it uninteresting.