That's the real question though, isn't it? I think what we are talking about is the kind of intelligence that could qualify as a "general AI" if implemented in a computer. Although I'm sure that there many different types of intelligence that could match up, in nature there really is only one that we know about.
I don't think such a thing as general AI, or even general intelligence, is sensible to talk about. There are always tradeoffs: an algorithm good at finding some sort of patterns, necessarily has to be worse at finding other sorts of patterns.
There are actually ways to formalize and prove that, but it's intuitively obvious that an algorithm that can find the answer to a set of questions, can't be faster than an algorithm to find the answer to a subset of those questions.
