The problem is that "smart" is overly broad for this discussion. We need to be much more precise. Clearly some LLMs have far greater reasoning ability or poetry

The problem is that "smart" is overly broad for this discussion. We need to be much more precise. Clearly some LLMs have far greater reasoning ability or poetry writing skills than dogs. But also LLMs don't possess many types of cognition that are fundamental abilities of animals. Such as visual/spatial modalities (although some models are multimodal -- still not in the same way animals are). But none of that means that LLMs can't be extremely useful.