[D] Opinion required: Was Intelligence Just Gradient Descent All Along?

In medieval philosophy, thinkers debated whether intelligence came from divine reason, innate forms, or logical structures built into the mind. Centuries later, early AI researchers tried to recreate intelligence through symbols and formal logic.

Now, large models that are trained on simple prediction, just optimizing loss at scale, can reason, write code, and solve complex problems.

Does this suggest intelligence was never about explicit rules or divine structure, but about compressing patterns in experience?

If intelligence can emerge from simple prediction at scale, was it ever about special rules or higher reasoning? Or are we just calling very powerful pattern recognition “thinking”?