“But is it intelligence?” Bertrand Meyer posed that question in Communications of the ACM this month, capturing a debate raging through tech circles. AI systems dazzle with feats once thought human-only. They translate languages flawlessly. Diagnose diseases better than some doctors. Yet skeptics insist: no real smarts here. Just clever tricks. Meyer, chief technology officer at Eiffel Software and professor emeritus at ETH Zurich, pins the confusion on clashing definitions. One camp sees intelligence as grasping concepts—true understanding . The other? Adapting to new situations. Learning from data. Predicting outcomes. Europeans lean conceptual, he notes. Americans? Pragmatic. Back at Stanford’s AI lab in the 1970s, luminaries like John McCarthy defined it as “the ability to adapt to new situations and learn from experience.” Meyer found that view shocking. Intelligo means “I understand,” after all. But here’s the rub. Modern AI thrives on the practical side.…