Your theory is wrong.
Those thing which count as intelligent aren't intelligent because they're finding statistical associations in historical datasets that have been pre-made and pre-disambiguated by people.
You don't know this, because any time you theorise to explain, you require empirical investigation and decades/centuries of science. You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient.
The reason that animals are intelligent isnt their cognition, narrowly. It's their bodies, broadly, which produce the input cognition requires.
In "doing all the hard work" by manufacturing data for machiens to process, we can produce computational models of cognition -- but these immitate intelligence, precisley because, the thing which we call intelligent is the very production of that data.