computer scientists, neurologists, and philosophers can’t answer that either, or else we’d already have the algorithms we’d need to build human equivalent A.I.

I think your mixing up sentience / consciousness with intelligence. What is consciousness doesn’t have a good answer right now and like you said philosophers, computer scientists and neurologist can’t come to a clear answer but most think llms aren’t conscious.

Intelligence on the other hand does have more concrete definitions that at least computer scientists use that usually revolve around the ability to solve diverse problems and answer questions outside of the entities original training set / database. Yes doing an SAT test with the answer key isn’t intelligent because that’s in your “database” and is just a matter of copying over the answers. LLMs don’t do this though, it doesn’t do a lookup of past SAT questions it’s seen and answer it, it uses some process of “reasoning” to do it. If you gave an LLM an SAT question that was not in it’s original training set it would probably still answer it correctly.

That isn’t to say that LLMs are the be all and end all of intelligence, there are different types of intelligence corresponding to the set of problems that intelligence is solving. A plant identification A.I. is intelligent for being able to identify various plants in different scenarios but it completely lacks any emotional, conversational intelligence, etc. The same can be said of a botanist who also may be able to identify plants but may lack some artistic intelligence to depict them. Intelligence comes in many forms.

Different tests can measure different forms of intelligence. The SAT measures a couple like reasoning, rhetoric, scientific etc. The turing test measures conversational intelligence , and the article you showed doesn’t seem to show a quote from him saying that it doesn’t measure intelligence, but turing would probably agree it doesn’t measure some sort of general intelligence, just one facet.