I feel your whole comment is years behind the current state of AI research, especially in regards to the whole "inference" angle which in itself is a rather loosely defined argument you chose to pick.

Your argument is also on shaky grounds because it would question the "intelligence" of many (average) humans, certainly in a pre-modern context.

It also doesn't answer the question where this "spark" comes from. Does a 6 month old baby do inference? A 2 year old kid, a 6 year old kid? When does this human "spark" begin? Your whole argument just shifts the whole problem of "intelligence" to a new (random) term with inference.

What we see in AI research really doesn't suggest that intelligence, inference or whatever other term you want to throw at the wall is anything else than something else than "mathematics" or "statistics".

It really is just two decades ago that it was an open question whether or not AI will even ever be able to properly write/translate random texts and that's nowadays considered to be an extremely low bar for AI, so low in fact that noone considers it an A(G)I worthy challenge anymore or as a sign of "intelligence" and currently we are on the same path with "creativity"/art.

So the goal posts will keep moving, now it's things like "inference" despite the fact that AI already covers that ground to some extent and even with extremely limited training data because it's certainly not true that AI today needs huge amounts of training data for "inference" (unsupervised training is a thing).

PS: I also think that you simply ignore the fact that in nature the "training data" is part of the DNA. There are systems/"code" built into every living being that is based on prior "experience" so it's always weird that this gets dismissed in such discussions (especially considering that evolution is literally a bruteforce statistical approach to optimization). It also ignores the millions of "inputs" every organism experiences and uses to "train" it's own "neural net".

So claiming that there is no intelligence in AI is somewhat akin to saying there is no intelligence in humans if we judged humanity by the intelligence of our infants.