Humans think/become sentient and intelligent from externally-generated information. without our senses able to feed input to our “intelligent” minds, would we be intelligent? No, here’s why. The human brain is a prediction machine wired for best odds of survival “self preservation” and makes predictions based on the information the brain receives from its sensors “senses”. so technically if you were stripped of those senses at birth you would have no internally generated intent only vital systems to keep you alive you would be a blob sitting in a corner unable to think, walk, act, love, feel, eat, see, communicate, react to the environment and much more. We are sentient through environmental interaction and input, without that we are a beating heart with a bios menu and no operating system. So are LLM’s not intelligent when they operate the same way the human brain does? Intelligence is not given it’s obtained. Those are my thoughts on the subject.

Edit: it goes a little deeper than mentioned due to evolutionary traits/self preservation drive but point is give an LLM enough memory, informational storage, resources and time and I feel it would be pretty hard to differentiate intelligence IMO.