And statistics are a way of giving us information about the world, as Locklin points out. But it is no more "intelligent" than the spreadsheet program on your PC.
That's why Eliezer Yudkowsky's sci-fi nonsense about protecting the world from "unfriendly AI" was always a grift, if not an outright scam. Yudkowsky is cut from the same cloth, metaphorically speaking, as Sam Bankman-Fried.