[Nevermark]

Intelligence can operate without learning. At a minimum inference and learning don’t need to be co-concurrent.

Not disagreeing with your point, but your terminology muddies your point.

But your point doesn't acknowledge that even with inference, there is a lot of room to tune the calculations. Multiple models, quantization tradeoffs are just the most obvious examples. Every architecture can be adjusted to increase intelligence/watt or other measure, even without further training.