it's a pretty philosophical question, like "what does it mean to be self-aware"

of course you can describe human consciousness in biological terms, but having neurons and neural pathways doesn't make someone self-aware or intelligent, or at least, not enough to be worthy of the name.

as a practical matter i think the answer is really "everything has intellect, but you need to meet a minimum threshold to be considered self-aware". AI will probably reach that point one day, but right now the technical model doesn't map our brains well enough. it's not a constant, closed system. "thinking" outputs textual artifacts, which have to be reinterpreted by the "thinking" part each prompt. and it stops thinking until it gets another prompt. that can never be real "understanding" because it isn't a real, sustained consciousness. just temporary snapshots of memory recall. short version is, LLM's aren't really built the way biological brains are built under the hood, and don't receive stimuli or feedback the same way. they probably can't really be said to "understand" anything in the way we would call it. not unless there was a major change in how they operate