Trying to compare anything to "intelligence" is a trap, imho. Intelligence is not a natural quantity, it's a word. There was no reason for a brain to become a universal approximator, or to have any specific mathematical property for that matter. Brains evolved to adapt behavior to the environment using the senses. The universe didn't care for creating some property called "intelligence".

I do see many results in NLP for example that have an eerie human-likeness, even if nobody can explain why. I am not an expert in the field, but i would think it's a challenge to find similar results made using another technique.