Prosaic AI

what are the possibilities for prosaic AI? i.e. if prosaic AI happened, then what are some possible reasons for why this happened? some ideas:

• optimizing hard enough produced a mesa-optimizer inside the neural network (or whatever)
• all of the things we humans do with our general intelligence turns out to be possible to do without actually "understanding" anything. i.e. in the same way that AlphaGo can play Go "without understanding" what it is doing, and how GPT-2 can write an essay "without understanding" its meaning, it turns out that all of the things humans do (including AI research) is possible without such understanding.