How do you prep for arc agi? If the answer is just "get really good at pattern recognition" I do not see that as a negative at all.

It can be not-negative without being sufficient.

Imagine that pattern recognition is 10% of the problem, and we just don't know what the other 90% is yet.

Streetlight effect for "what is intelligence" leads to all the things that LLMs are now demonstrably good at… and yet, the LLMs are somehow missing a lot of stuff and we have to keep inventing new street lights to search underneath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

I dont think many people are saying 100% arc-agi 2 is equivalent to AGI(names are dumb as usual). Its just the best metric I have found, not the final answer. Spatial reasoning is an important part of intelligence even if it doesnt encompass all of it.