> this implies higher intelligence

Models aren't intelligent, the intelligence is latent in the text (etc) that the model ingests. There is no concrete definition of intelligence, only that humans have it (in varying degrees).

The best you can really state is that a model extracts/reveals/harnesses more intelligence from its training data.

There is no concrete definition of a chair either.

> There is no concrete definition of intelligence

Note that if this is true (and it is!) all the other statements about intelligence and where it is and isn’t found in the post (and elsewhere) are meaningless.