Why call AIs a life form? They aren't like cellular life.

I think the assumption they were making was that rather than an LLM this was a type of AI that has animal-like characteristics. Which sounds fanciful but at least at a functional level you could get some main aspects just by removing guardrails from a large multimodal model and instructing it to work on its own goals, self preservation, etc. And researchers are working hard to create more lifelike systems that wouldn't necessarily be very similar to LLMs.

The animal like systems might be interesting to observe, but it doesn't sound like they would be useful for doing much work. I am not sure where the reliance on them would come in.