Intelligence is a spectrum on anything living. Bacteria are the lowest on the spectrum. Single cell organism. But it is an organism. Viruses are not alive. Bacteria can live independently. A virus requires a host to reproduce. Anything that's alive, has some level of intelligence. We cannot create life from nothing. We are not God. We can clone, we can reproduce, but we cannot take things that are not alive and make them living by throwing enough compute at it. We can only ever make a good copycat.