So in other words... Artificial intelligence?

LLM are surprisingly effective as general AI. Tasks that used to require a full on ML team are now accessible with 10 minutes of "prompting".

Do you think we know enough about what intelligence is to rule out whether LLM's might be a form of it?

How smart would any human be without training and source material?

Smart enough to make weapons, tame dogs, start fires and cultivate plants. Humans managed to do that even when most of their time was spent gathering food or starving.

Nobody cares about making an AI with basic human survival skills. We could probably have a certified genius level AI that still couldn't do any of that because it lacks a meaningful physical body.

If we wanted to make that the goal instead of actual meaningful contributions to human society, we could probably achieve it, and it would be a big waste of time imo.

I think the boy of Aveyron answers that question pretty well.

Thanks for the reference. My takeaway from reading up on him is, not very smart at all.