Comment by sanderjd

I think he's creating a definition for an abstract thing here, and using the word "intelligence" to represent that abstract thing.

In your analogy, the "CRUD app" is analogous to the car, but that's not what Thompson is defining to be the unit of "intelligence". He's saying that some number of units of "intelligence" are necessary to create that CRUD app, somewhat analogously to how some number of units of energy are necessary to create a car.

But I agree with you that this concept of a "unit of intelligence" that he's using is probably too abstract to ever be usefully well defined.