Where these competitions differ from real life is that evaluating a solution is much easier than generating a solution. We're at the point where AI can do a pretty good job of evaluating solutions, which is definitely an impressive step. We're also at the point where AI can generate candidate solutions to problems like these, which is also impressive. But the degree to which that translates to practical utility is questionable.

The sibling commenter compared this to go, but we could go back to comparing it with chess. Deepblue didn't play chess the way a human did. It deployed massive amounts of compute, to look at as many future board states as possible, in order to see which move would work out. People who said that a computer that could play chess as well as a human would be as smart as a human ended up eating crow. These modern AIs are also not playing these competitions the way a human does. Comparing their intelligence to that of a humans is similarly fallacious.