Yes, you are correct. They provide knowledge and the human is the operator of the intelligence portion.

It goes back to the old wisdom DIKW pyramid.

EDITED My ASCI art pyramid did not work. So imagine a pyramid with DATA at the bottom, INFORMATION on top of the data, and KNOWLEDGE sitting on top of the INFORMATION, with WISDOM at the top.

And then trying top guess where AI is? Some people say that Information is the knowing, what, knowledge the how, and Wisdom the why.

In general conversation, “intelligence”, “knowledge”, “smartness”, “expertise”, etc are used mostly interchangeably.

If we want to get pedantic, I would point out that “knowledge” is formally defined as “justified true belief”, and I doubt we want to get into the quagmire of whether LLM’s actually have beliefs.

I took OP’s point in the casual meaning, i.e. that LLMs are like what I would call an “intelligent coworker”, or how one might call a Jeopardy game show contestant as intelligent.