But... ant hive does not posess any intelligence, right? Despite colonies of ants are able to perform quite complex tasks.

What is intelligence? The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It's all relative. Not as intelligent as a human but more intelligent than a plant.

"The ability to achieve objectives in many different environments" is as good of a definition you need in order to achieve very powerful things.

Would be nice to have enough of a theory of intelligence to be more precise than that, but the above definition will go very far.

We actually made a wide swing from reasoning to intelligence. So I propose to ditch ants and get back on track.

Reasoning, an easier thing to prove, we can literally go ask bing chat to determine something and it will follow a logical thought process to answer your question (this is reasoning). They've confirmed it was running GPT4.

Humans are very irrational but are still very good at this when they want to be but not always. A limiting factor for GPT4 is probably computing space/power.

Finding most probable words from the internet for a given prompt have nothing to do with reasoning.

Please go type a query into bing chat or chatgpt 4 where reasoning is involved and it can answer you. Ask it something you haven't seen.

AI can reason, it might not be the greatest especially at numbers and where there's data contamination but it can do it.

There's something called abductive reasoning, a gift and a curse at the same time.

I will try another analogy. What if we have a parrot with exceptional memory, which can not only repeat things it heard some time ago, but to continue words it hearing now. I come to the cage and say: "Cogito?" and parrot continue "Ergo sum!". Is parrot intelligent and able to reason, even if I do not know about Descartes?