I didn't say we should assume LLMs are intelligent. In fact I always thought they weren't because they only "forward pass".

But then they came up with the whole "Reasoning model" paradigm and that contains obvious feedback loops. So now just throw my hands in the air because I think no one really knows or can tell for sure. We are all clueless here.

I can really recommend this book by Douglas Hofstadter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop