1) we should agree on what we mean by smart or intelligent. That's really hard to do so let's narrow it down to "does not hallucinate" the way GPT does, or more high level has a subjective understanding of its own that another agent can reliably come to trust. I can tell you that AI/deep learning/LLM hallucination is a technically unsolvable problem, so it'll never get "smarter" in that way.
2) This connects to number 2. Humans and animals of course aren't infinitely "smart;" we fuck up and hallucinate in ways of our own, but that's just it, we have a grounded truth of our own, born of a body and emotional experience that grounds our rational experience, or the consciousness you talk about.
So my claim is really one claim, that AI cannot perform the same tasks or "true" intelligence level of a human in the sense of not hallucinating like GPT without having a subjective experience of its own.
There is no answer or understanding "out there;" it's all what we experience and come to understand.
This is my favorite topic. I have much more to share on it including working code, though at a level of an extremely simple organism (thinking we can skip to human level and even jump exponentially beyond that is what I'm calling out as BS).
Compare ChatGPT to a dog-- a dog's experience of an audible "sit" command maps to that particular dog's history of experience, manipulated through pain or pleasure (i.e. if you associate treat + "sit", you'll have a dog with its own grounded definition of sit). A human also learns words like "sit," and we always have our own understanding of those words, even if we can agree on them together too certain degrees in lines of linguistic corpora. In fact, the linguistic corpora is borne out of our experiences, our individual understandings, and that's a one way arrow, so something trained purely on that resultant data is always an abstraction level away from experience, and therefore from true grounded understanding or truth. Hence GPT (and all deep learning) unsolvable hallucination or grounding problems.