You can also train a horse to tap it's foot once for "yes" and twice for "no". You can ask it a bunch of questions, and it can seem like you're having a conversation, but it turns out the horse is just paying attention to a few details about your body language and performing the action you gave it carrots for. It might seem like intelligence, even to the trainer, but it's a parlor trick.

Once the horse starts tapping its foot to accurately detect cancer better than humans, then, parlor trick or not, you've got a fine horse there.

I don't mean to diminish the power and value provided by deep learning, but it doesn't change the fact that pattern recognition is not equivalent to intelligence.

I don't disagree that pattern recognition and intelligence are (probably?) different things.

But if they're functionality equivalent, I'm cool with that.

Heck, it might turn out that humans are already just pattern recognition machines and nothing but. I'm cool with that too.