Yes, it could be that intelligence is essentially a sophisticated form of recursive, brute force pattern matching.

I'm beginning to think the Bitter Lesson applies to organic intelligence as well, because basic pattern matching can be implemented relatively simply using very basic mathematical operations like multiply and accumulate, and so it can scale with massive parallelization of relatively simple building blocks.

I don't think it's accurate to describe LLMs as pattern matching. Prediction is the mechanism they use to ingest and output information, and they end up with a (relatively) deep model of the world under the hood.

Intelligence is hallucination that happens to produce useful results in the real world.