They are closely related but not the same thing.
A counterexample is chess.
What an ideal chess player does? It predicts which move is optimal. May be a tricky feat, but he is good and predicts it well.
I looked this thread in past minutes and I clearly saw this "ideological division". Few people thinks as I do. Other say - you can't solve causal problems with a mere prediction. But don't give a clear example.
Don't you agree, that an ideal "best next chess move predictor" is the strongest possible chess player?
Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:
"In some ways you could say intelligence is all about prediction," he explained. "What you can identify in intelligence is it can predict what is going to happen in the world with more accuracy and more time horizon than others."
rather than of a world optimizer. This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition. This "AI as intelligence augmentation" view appears to be prevalent among the AI researchers in general.