I think intelligence is in the language, mostly, of course there are other forms of intelligence as well. Yet most of it is not in the brain, or in the AI, but in language. The corpus of everything said and written, all knowledge, science, technology, systems of thinking. A human growing without language would not be very intelligent.

So an AI would be intelligent in the same way a human is - by becoming inhabited by language. Does that make AIs and simulated beings any less than us?