There's no intelligence without teleology. Intelligence and information are only meaningful concepts of you assert (necessarily without any evidence except the circular kind) that some differences matter.

Do the cells "have" to do anything? Do we? Sure, they might die if they do the "wrong" thing, but 1. Who's to say the inert state of "dead" matter is any worse than the state of a living cell, and 2. Cells clearly aren't always optimizing for their own survival anyway