Agreed. It is nonsensical to argue that a 3B transformer that hard-capped to decode 100 tokens is "intelligent". Of course when we are evaluating whether "transformers" is intelligent or not, we are talking about taking transformers as a core part of the system in some ways and enhance it with some other means (as you said, it is pretty trivial to making transformers a Turing machine, hence can carry out any compute, including intelligence (if you are in the camp that intelligence is computable, I don't think it makes sense to argue with anyone who otherwise believes intelligence is not computable)).