I think the most plausible view is: what we call intelligence is a collection of a large number of algorithms and innovations each of which slightly increases effectiveness in a reasonably broad range of tasks.
To see why both view A and B seem strange to me, consider the analog for physical tasks. You could say that there is a simple core to human physical manipulation which allows us to solve any problem in some very broad natural domain. Or you could think that we just have a ton of tricks for particular manipulation tasks. But neither of those seems right, there is no simple core to the human body plan but at the same time it contains many features which are helpful across a broad range of tasks.
Regarding the physical manipulation analogy: I think that there actually is a simple core to the human body plan. This core is, more or less: a spine, two arms with joints in the middle, two legs with joints in the middle, feet and arms with fingers. This is probably already enough to qualitatively solve more or less all physical manipulation problems humans can solve. All the nuances are needed to make it quantitatively more efficient and deal with the detailed properties of biological tissues, biological muscles et cetera (the latter might be considered analogous to the detailed properties of computational hardware and input/output channels for brains/AGIs).
I think that your view is plausible enough, however, if we focus only on qualitative performance metrics (e.g. time complexity up to a polynomial, regret bound up to logarithmic factors), then this collection probably includes only a small number of innovations that are important.
I think the most plausible view is: what we call intelligence is a collection of a large number of algorithms and innovations each of which slightly increases effectiveness in a reasonably broad range of tasks.
To see why both view A and B seem strange to me, consider the analog for physical tasks. You could say that there is a simple core to human physical manipulation which allows us to solve any problem in some very broad natural domain. Or you could think that we just have a ton of tricks for particular manipulation tasks. But neither of those seems right, there is no simple core to the human body plan but at the same time it contains many features which are helpful across a broad range of tasks.
Regarding the physical manipulation analogy: I think that there actually is a simple core to the human body plan. This core is, more or less: a spine, two arms with joints in the middle, two legs with joints in the middle, feet and arms with fingers. This is probably already enough to qualitatively solve more or less all physical manipulation problems humans can solve. All the nuances are needed to make it quantitatively more efficient and deal with the detailed properties of biological tissues, biological muscles et cetera (the latter might be considered analogous to the detailed properties of computational hardware and input/output channels for brains/AGIs).
I think that your view is plausible enough, however, if we focus only on qualitative performance metrics (e.g. time complexity up to a polynomial, regret bound up to logarithmic factors), then this collection probably includes only a small number of innovations that are important.