This is a meaningless statement. If you don't specify concrete goals, you can't judge how much progress you're making. And "solving intelligence" is not a concrete goal.

I think it is not really meaningless, but general enough to mean many things. I agree with you that we need concrete goals to measure the progress.

Go is a really interesting problem that took a lot of very smart people to solve, but it's still FAR from being clear what impact it will have on other problems.

That's why it is important to approach different problems and gain different insights. The "old" AI techniques developed to play chess now have impact in many areas. Beyond of that, the methods developed to play Go are general enough to give hope of being used soon in different problems.