Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.

Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.

Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.

A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It's more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.