I certainly don’t think intelligence has to be made out of meat but I do think it’s a complex set of questions and we owe it to ourselves to actually try to tackle the underlying issue of what intelligence and self-awareness etc really are and how we might know whether a model did or did not exhibit these, because we are apt to fool ourselves on both sides of this argument depending on our prior beliefs.
You can see the same thing when people talk about whether animals exhibit self-awareness. There are experiments with dolphins and mirrors for example that definitely suggest that dolphins recognise and might even be amused by their reflection when they see it, but some people find it very hard to reconcile themselves to the idea tgat a dolphin might have a sense of self. I personally find it harder to believe that any particular characteristic would be uniquely human.
You can see the same thing when people talk about whether animals exhibit self-awareness. There are experiments with dolphins and mirrors for example that definitely suggest that dolphins recognise and might even be amused by their reflection when they see it, but some people find it very hard to reconcile themselves to the idea tgat a dolphin might have a sense of self. I personally find it harder to believe that any particular characteristic would be uniquely human.