However paths are made out of rays. So the basic technology implemented on the GPU is to calculate intersections or rays against geometry, raytracing, which is the basic building block of path tracing and several other classes of algorithms.

Yes, maybe for the individual English words "path" and "ray", but as a graphics term, path tracing is a subset of a larger area called ray tracing. There are many, many different forms and algorithms for ray tracing, and path tracing is one of those.