I think what the GP meant is not that compressed data has intelligence, but rather that a compressor is necessarily "intelligent" in correlation to the degree t

I think what the GP meant is not that compressed data has intelligence, but rather that a compressor is necessarily "intelligent" in correlation to the degree that it compresses well on arbitrary novel datasets it wasn't tuned for. At least insofar as we define "intelligence" with measures like IQ, that relate to "number of examples of a pattern required to notice the pattern." To compress data, you have to derive some interesting insight about that data that allows the data to be projected into a lower-dimensional, lower-entropy embedding. (In pop-neurological terms, you have to "make a neuron" that represents a concept, so that you can re-phrase your dataset into a star-schema expressed in its connections to that concept.) The more different kinds of things a single compressor can do that for — without the compressor itself being made larger — the more "intelligent" the compressor is, no?