ding ding ding. both soham + recruiter implied he basically just codes day and night. our founder (yc) was drooling! there's a very specific type of company + founder that falls for this stuff. no surprise he targeted ai startups.
IQ tests are also distinct skills but IQ scores are the most quantifiable and studied numbers in all of psychology and correlate with all kinds of things like job performance.
I think the purpose of the interview is the same thing. Even though there's no strong evidence for a correlation it's reasonable to believe intuitively that there is.
I suspect (and have seen some evidence) that the interviews he aced were algo-based. Doing well in these is very repeatable, with low additional effort. Behavioural are much harder to do at scale.
Perhaps, he is also genuinely good at cracking these interviews. No wonder, he's been through so many of them.