Agreed. Many animals without language show evidence of thinking (e.g. complex problem solving skills and tool use). Language is clearly an enabler of complex thought in humans but not the entire basis of our intelligence, as it is with LLMs.
But having language as the basis doesn't mean it isn't intelligence, right? At least I see no argument for that in what's being said. Stability can come from a basis of steel but it can also have a basis of wood.
LLMs have no intelligence or problem solving skills and don't use tools. What they do is statistically pattern match a prompt against a vast set of tokenized utterances by humans, who do have intelligence and complex problem solving skills. If the LLM's training data were the writings of a billion monkeys banging on typewriters, any appearance of intelligence and problem solving skills would disappear.
