Maybe I'm misinterpreting your point, but this makes it seem that your standard for "intelligence" is "inventing entirely new techniques"? If so, it's a bit extreme, because to a first approximation, all problem solving is combining and applying existing techniques in novel ways to new situations.

At the point that you are inventing entirely new techniques, you are usually doing groundbreaking work. Even groundbreaking work in one field is often inspired by techniques from other fields. In the limit, discovering truly new techniques often requires discovering new principles of reality to exploit, i.e. research.

As you can imagine, this is very difficult and hence rather uncommon, typically only accomplished by a handful of people in any given discipline, i.e way above the standards of the general population.

I feel like if we are holding AI to those standards, we are talking about not just AGI, but artificial super-intelligence.