I find that, if you look closely enough, there can never really be any “intelligence”. Everything is just a model or a likely association or a statistical model, etc. and it will always be that. This statement of there being no intelligence really seems overly reductionist.

I completely agree.

But i was disappointed to find out that by formal definition "AI" is a term that encompasses machine learning and neural networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

That, or I'm misreading the Wikipedia article.