I also achieve better performance on cognitive tasks when I use language to first describe the problem I'm trying to solve. In fact, it usually helps quite a bit (see: rubber-duck debugging)

I'm not sure the word "intelligence" really fits what these models are doing. I do however think it's safe to say that they are performing cognition - even if it's 'simply' cognition over their provided context and even if it's entirely limited by their training set. We still have a machine that can perform automated cognition over a increasingly wide distribution of data.