Why would being able to quickly reference all of human knowledge be relevant at all? Intelligence is not about speed, it is about correctness, which is precisely why it's concerning that frontier models keep stumbling on things that should be piss easy to get correct.

Else by your logic the exact same model running on hardware that's half as powerful is somehow half as "intelligent"

And no, humans and other species don't learn the way that LLMs do. That's fairly obvious even if one isn't a neuroscience nerd.