pretty sure it comes from latin “inter-lego” (collect or pick out information, like you would pick out the good fruit from a bush with good and bad fruit).

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intelligent

so it’s about filtering what you want to have from what you don’t want to have. i.e. a mathematical function f : X -> R which maps an object x to a real number to figure out how desirable that object is, i.e. assign value to it.

technically you don’t even need neural networks for it, sorting algorithms employ this kind of function all the time to sort objects according to some criteria.